Sight Fishing for Trout, second edition
By Landon Mayer. Published by Stackpole Books, 2019; $29.95 softbound.
When no fish are rising, where do you fish? Most tactical manuals for fly fishing are predicated upon the angler fishing without knowledge of where the fish actually are, but rather, where they are likely to be. A classic example is Ray Ovingtonās Tactics on Trout, 50 years old this year, which spends close to 300 pages describing different types of water and telling you where to stand and place each cast or drift to maximize your chances of hooking unseen fish.
Surely, most of us cover the water in this manner, focusing on pockets, structure, and currents, rather than visible fish. That is why Landon Mayerās Sight Fishing for Trout is such an intriguing work. The anglerās intent here is to see through the water, ascertain the presence of a trout, then hook it.
Of course, the question is why go through the hassle if blind fishing works well enough. In the second editionās foreword, Ed Engle astutely notes that āItās a skill thatās essential for guides and anglers who fish the clear waters of spring creeks and tailwaters. Itās also the basis for what I believe is the apex fly-fishing experience.ā But Engle doesnāt go far enough; Mayer makes the case that sight fishing is a way to ācatch more and larger trout,ā especially on waters that suffer significant angling pressure. In essence, itās a way to hunt trophies, a way to find fish ābetween the conventional fishing spotsā on crowded waters, a way to improve oneās knowledge and fishing techniques ā a way to get more out of our sport.
Mayer starts off by telling the reader that āspotting trout is one of the hardest fly-fishing skills to learn.ā He then spends the next seven chapters lifting the blinders by educating you on what to wear (the specifics of sunglasses and clothing), how to position yourself to see through the water, clues to look for that give away a fishās position, clues that indicate its feeding behavior, and how to approach the fish after youāve spotted it. Because trout that you can see have the potential to see you, stealth at all stages is critical.
The eight chapters that follow are about how to hook your quarry, and as such, the advice they provide has high utility irrespective of whether youāre fishing by sight or fishing blindly. Starting with dry-fly fishing, Mayer discusses rise forms, counterintuitively noting that āthe best way to sight-fish dry fliesā is not to āmatch the hatch,ā but to use the behavior of the fish toward the insects when choosing pattern and presentation. He describes the rigs he likes to fish (nearly always with two flies) and the casts and presentations that he finds useful, including a variation of the steeple cast that he calls the āsteeple cast punch,ā which he says is especially effective in the wind. After dry-fly fishing, Mayer moves on to nymphing presentations, casts, and preferred rigs and patterns. Although Mayer is certainly competent at achieving natural, drag-free drifts, when heās sight fishing with nymphs, he strives to get close to his target and make short casts. As a consequence, he writes, ā70 percent of the presentations I make to trout are not drifting drag free. Tension on the line lets you control the flies as they drift and allows you to . . . adjust to different situations . . . Keep some tension on the line so that the flies will drift right where you want them to go.ā And if he needs depth, Mayer prefers fishing weighted nymphs rather than placing split shot on the leader ā another hit to the belief that the naturalistic movement of unweighted nymphs will lead to more hookups.
The final chapters cover fishing with streamers (Mayer uses a floating line 90 percent of the time), fighting fish, and relying on a buddy to spot fish and guide the presentation. A lot of the advice he provides is, again, useful even when blind fishing.
One final note: Mayer tends to write succinctly and clearly, two critical qualities for a teacher. But in the chapter āSeeing the Fight,ā clarity for me was occasionally muddled in discussions of rod position. Fortunately, issues of interpretation are rare. Sight Fishing for Trout not only will help you spot more trout more easily, Landon Mayerās insights from long experience on the water will enhance your repertoire of rigs, casts, flies, and tactics.
ā Richard Anderson
Classics Revisited
With Michael Checchio
A Fly Fisherās Life
By Charles Ritz. Published by Henry Holt and Company, 1959.
Charles Ritz managed the worldās most luxurious hotel, but his true avocation was fly fishing. As director of the Hotel Ritz in Paris, a glamorous establishment that catered to the rich and famous, Charles Ritz divided his time between his management duties and his passion for designing fly rods. It was clear to everyone who knew him that the grand hotelier would rather be fishing.
In its day, the Ritz was considered the acme of luxury hotels, the place where royalty and talent came to be pampered. āThe customer is always right,ā Charles Ritz said, āeven when we have to throw him out.ā
A short, dapper man of erect military bearing, with a pencil-thin mustache and cropped salt-and-pepper hair, Charles Ritz was constantly on the move. Only fivefoot six and weighing 145 pounds in his waders, he had the metabolism of a hummingbird. Always restless, ever curious, he was filled with energy, even into old age. More interested in casting than in fishing (āI tend to lose interest after the fish has been hookedā), he could drop a 25-yard cast straight into the open mouth of a feeding trout. A designer of the āparabolicā fly rod, he preached the āhigh-line, high-speedā style of fly casting, which seemed more suited to tournament play than to trout fishing. Even into his eighties, he could easily lay out a hundred feet of fly line on a light bamboo rod and fire off quick casts with perfect tight loops all day.
Charles was the first of two sons born to the great Swiss hotelier Cesar Ritz, and he was a somewhat reluctant heir to his fatherās business. Cesar was the son of a poor goatherd from the village of Niederwald in the Swiss Alps. Hopeless at school, Cesar was apprenticed as a wine waiter, but was soon fired, because the only skill he seemed able to master was breaking dishes. But the lad persevered and worked his way up the rungs, advancing from bellhop to waiter to maĆ®tre dāhotel until finally being crowned āthe king of hoteliers and hotelier to kingsā after he became the director of the international chain of luxury establishments bearing his name. The adjective ritzy derives from his surname, as well as from the name of his most famous landmark, the Hotel Ritz on the Place VendĆ“me in central Paris. Ritz has come to mean āfirst classā and the last word in elegance, and the name can be found stamped onto many brands, including humbler ones such as the popular cracker introduced by Nabisco in 1934, which offered to its Depression-era customers āa bite of the good life.ā
Cesar opened his grand hotel on the Place VendĆ“me with famed chef August Escoffier on June 1, 1898, and history was made that night. It was billed as the worldās first luxury hotel ā the first to offer electric lights, a telephone, and a bath in every room ā and the gala opening drew the glitterati and literati of Paris. Charles, a little boy clinging to his motherās gown, watched in wide-eyed wonder as his father greeted the swells and glamorous guests. From that night on, the Ritz became a fashionable destination for international socialites, political and financial elites, and artistic luminaries. Its roster of famous guests includes Marcel Proust, who wrote great chunks of his masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time, while holed up in the Ritz. (Legend has it that when Proust was on his deathbed, he asked for cold take-out beer delivered to his private lodgings directly from the Ritz.) Chopin checked in as a guest, and Cole Porter composed songs in the hotel bar. Irving
Berlin wrote āPuttinā on the Ritzāā which meant to dress fashionably. The term āroll out the red carpetā is said to have derived from the opulent carpet in the lobby. Oscar Wilde complained about the bathrooms and lights. Jazz Age greats Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald set scenes from their novels The Sun Also Rises and Tender Is the Night inside the hotel. (āWhen I dream of an afterlife in heaven,ā Hemingway wrote to his friend A. E. Hotchner, āthe action always takes place in the Paris Ritz.ā) Charlie Chaplin and Maria Callas stayed there, as did Lillie Langtry, King Edward VII, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and the Prince of Wales. Princess Diana ate her last meal in the hotelās Imperial Suite before perishing that night in a terrible automobile accident. No doubt the hotelās most glamorous guest was the fashion maven Coco Chanel, who made the Ritz her home for 34 years. āWhen in Paris,ā said Hemingway, āthe only reason not to stay at the Ritz is if you canāt afford it.ā
But Cesarās son Charles wasnāt exactly a chip off the old block. Hotel management held little interest for him in those days. In 1917, Cesar dispatched his eldest son to the United States to complete his management training. While working as night manager at the RitzCarlton in New York, Charles whiled away the hours repairing bamboo fly rods that he picked up in East Side pawnshops. He then sold these restored rods to Abercrombie and Fitch, the famous sporting-goods emporium, which was only a short walk from his hotel. His hobby led him to become a major designer of fly rods. He is credited with inventing the so-called āparabolicā fly rod, a termed coined by Everett Garrison, who saw a Ritz prototype. These would later be produced en masse by Pezon et Michel (Ritz was a paid consultant for the French sporting-goods company) and by American rod makers such as Paul Young in Michigan.
Charles Ritz caught his maiden trout not on the storied rivers of Europe, but on the Beaverkill after being introduced to that Catskill stream by his New York dentist. His only previous trout angling experience had taken place on a chalk stream in Normandy and had not been particularly auspicious. He had āhorsewhippedā the fly water to no avail and decided that fishing wasnāt for him. But his experience on the Beaverkill led him to believe that there might be something to the sport after all, and he would spend a decade in America proving that assumption by fishing trout streams all over the Northeast and out West.
When the United States entered the Great War in 1918, Charles, who had already completed his mandatory service in Switzerland, enlisted as a sergeant-major in the U.S. Army. Good use was made of his interpretive skills interviewing foreign-born troops, because he was fully fluent in English and three of the four national languages of his native Switzerland. After the war, he lingered in the United States for another decade, starting up any number of free-and-easy businesses, enterprises that allowed him leisure to fish, including his Ritz Import and Export Corporation, a one-man operation based in Times Square. Charles dabbled at being a gentleman stockbroker, freelanced as a tackle consultant, and did a dozen or so other little chores while traveling around the United States showing home movies of fishing. He caused a scandal by eloping with a 16-year-old girl from Forest Hills, Queens, when he was 35. He married young Elizabeth Pearce in Jersey City over the opposition of her parents, but the childless couple soon divorced, and he did not marry again until very late in life.
Charles was finally summoned back to Paris by his widowed mother, the rather intimidating Marie Louise Beck Ritz. Both his father and his younger brother, RenĆ©, had died in 1918. And prior to that. Cesar, whom Charles had never really gotten to know well due to his fatherās itinerant lifestyle, had ended up as a convalescent in expensive sanitariums due to a series of mental crackups, leaving Madame Ritz to run the business affairs of the hotel empire. The widow felt it was high time for her son to return to 15 Place VendĆ“me to help her run the Hotel Ritz.
The problem was that Charles tended to look on management of the worldās most glamorous hotel as little more than a sideline for his fishing. Returning home and finding the Hotel Ritz to be competently run, Charles took a part-time job in the Paris office of a New York stockbroker and later opened a luxury shoe store on the very chic Rue du Faubourg Saint-HonorĆ©. That elegant store, with its displays of expensive footwear, turned out to be little more than a front for the real business at hand ā the building of fly rods in a back room. This was in the heyday of bamboo rod making, and it was here that Ritz refined his parabolic designs while consulting with the American rod maker Jim Payne. (In later years, he would experiment with fiberglass when that new material came on the market.) The back room of the store soon became a clubhouse for international fly casters from all over the continent, and eventually it expanded into the International Fario Club, the most select private angling club of the last century.
This is not to say that Charles neglected his duties back at the Hotel Ritz. He served as director and chairman of the board, although he kept no office, preferring to be seen in the public rooms of the hotel. He moved briskly through them on his daily rounds, chatting with guests and staff, inspecting the menus, sampling the homemade potato chips in the Bar VendĆ“me, always in motion and forever on the lookout for some minor imperfection that needed correction. He attempted to introduce a few progressive ideas ā such as his restaurant LāEspadon (it means āthe swordfishā) ā but often found himself stymied by the board. He might have been chairman of the board of the Ritz Hotel Syndicate, Ltd., but he never owned more than 1 percent of the stock, which was mostly in the hands of British and continental investors. There was nothing ritzy about Charles himself. An expert on haute cuisine and fine wine, he himself was a man of simpler tastes, preferring spaghetti and beer over more sumptuous fare. He lived out of a pair of rooms on the top floor of the Ritz, in an apartment directly across from Coco Chanelās fabulous suite. But his rooms were small and rather cramped, the larger one given over to storage space for his collection of model trains, another hobby that became a mania for him in his later years. But his most steadfast love was fly fishing.
And he fished for trout, salmon, and grayling all over the world every chance he got, which it turned out was quite often. (āAs the world is run now,ā Ernest Hemingway said in his foreword to A Fly Fisherās Life, āfew people can fish as far as Monsieur Charles fishes. No matter how it is run even fewer people could ever fish as well.ā) Ritz made a religion out of casting and was a zealot preaching the gospel. His casting stroke was said to have the perfectly calibrated timing of one his nationās Swiss watches. And he expected everybody else to be able to cast his way.
A Fly Fisherās Life has been read by anglers all over the world. It was originally published in 1953 in French as Pris sur le Vif, an idiomatic expression that can mean āred-handed,ā ācaught in the act,ā or ātaken on the spotā and is meant to imply a snapshot or a quick portrait, rather than a true autobiography, as its English-language title wrongly suggests. It is in the main an advanced fishing treatise with a lot of anecdotes. Most of the angling takes place on privately controlled European waters, and the book seems directed more to the experienced fly fisher than to beginners. There is very little in it about the authorās actual life ā at least those parts of it that Charles Ritz lived on dry land.
Oh, the stories he could have told ā but didnāt ā about that grand hotel and its guests. Readers can learn everything there is to know about the loft and timing of a perfectly controlled cast, but nothing whatsoever about how Coco Chanel turned out to be a Nazi collaborator. Or how Hermann Goering filled the Imperial Suite of the Ritz with stolen art after the Germans requisitioned all the grand hotels in Paris during the occupation. And not a word about how his friend Ernest Hemingway āliberatedā the Ritz bar. A war correspondent, Hemingway made it to Paris in a Jeep a few hours ahead of French Commander General Phillippe Leclerc and the allied forces on Liberation Day. He found that the Germans had already fled the Ritz, and he celebrated by running up a bar tab for 51 martinis.
In fact, aside from an anecdote about Ritz selling restored fly rods to Abercrombie and Fitch while working as night manager at the Ritz-Carlton, there is little in this book to indicate he did anything other than wet a line.
Perhaps he just assumed that the whole world knew who he was and how he could afford to travel and play the way he did. It is left to A. J. McClane in his introduction to make any mention at all of the Hotel Ritz. āFew people,ā McClane wrote, āhave ever understood whether Charles is in the hotel business or the fishing tackle business.ā There is plenty of fishing in these pages ā but thatās pretty much all there is. All the truly interesting highlights of what was after all a most remarkable life have to be searched for elsewhere.
But I suppose that was all part of the manās eccentricity. William Humphrey, the fine Texas novelist who wrote Open Season, a collection of sporting essays that includes āThe Spawning Runā and āMy Moby Dickā and who once survived a casting lesson given to him by Charles Ritz, said the hotelier divided the whole world into fly fishers and āfly-swattersāā the latter being a dismissive term Charles used for anyone who didnāt fish. Yet he was a force of nature and a wonder to behold, whether prowling the lobby of the Ritz or hip-deep in a river.
Charles Ritz died in 1976, at age 84, three months after giving up the directorship of the Hotel Ritz. Three years later, his grand hotel in Paris was sold
to Mohamed Al-Fayed, the Egyptian billionaire who owned Harrods Department Store in London. (The billionaireās son Dodi died along with Princess Diana in that car crash.) After shutting its doors for the first time in history for a renovation that took almost four years to complete, the Hotel Ritz reopened to great fanfare on June 6, 2016.
Charles Ritz is buried in PĆØre Lachaise Cemetery, presumably not anywhere near Jim Morrison. His illustrious family name continues to be used as a brand for many products and services, both licensed and unlicensed by the bearer, and Ritz is still a byword for the best. Old fishing catalogs show rods that carry his name, such as the Charles Ritz Variopower, a rod with a fiberglass butt and bamboo tip that set a long-distance casting record of 151 feet.His grand hotel in Paris lives on. The cost of a room at the Hotel Ritz presently ranges from $1,330 to $20,000 per night. Nothing there comes cheap. To steady your nerves, you might want to have a drink in the Hemingway Bar. A few of Papaās fishing poles are on display there. The Ritz Sidecar is still the worldās most expensive cocktail (1,500 euros). For the rest of us, thereās always the cracker.