The Orvis Guide to Hatch Strategies
By Tom Rosenbauer. Published by Lyons Press, 2022; $34.95 softbound.
If it’s true that trout do 90 percent of their feeding below the surface of the water, why wouldn’t you just do 100 percent of your fishing there by offering them flies in the most efficient way possible, by some form of indicator nymphing? One answer is that catching fish in the most efficient way is not always the most satisfying way to fish with artificial flies, because fly fishing offers much more than that, and fishing to specific hatches is a way to access that “more.”
As Tom Rosenbauer puts it in The Orvis Guide to Hatch Strategies, “Fishing to hatches is about problem solving and trying to fool a trout into eating an insect imitation you’ve carefully tied yourself or selected out of the bins of a fly shop” to imitate a particular stage of a particular bug in a particular time and place, based on what you know or can learn about bugs and hatch-timing and places. “It’s about stalking fish while trying to make as little an imprint on the stream environment as you can,” not chucking and chancing a weighted lure, but studying the water, looking for insects, and understanding the life processes in which the bugs and the fish are engaged. “It’s about standing in a chuckling riffle or wading a challenging piece of pocket water. Tying the right knots. And going home satisfied with a day on the water,” maybe having caught fish, but certainly having been fulfilled by putting your intellectual, aesthetic, and physical faculties to the test, not just by catching fish in the most efficient way.
Because trout still do 10 percent of their feeding at the surface and do some of that 90 percent just below it, deep-nymphing methods frequently ignore what is going on right in front of the angler, which is a process, not a static state of affairs in which 90 percent of the action is taking place, and that process is the entire life cycle of the aquatic insects on which the trout feed, the process that almost every day culminates in nymphs and pupas emerging as adults, mating, ovipositing, and dying in the river — in short, the hatch.
Fishing flies exclusively subsurface also ignores what was the most significant development in fly fishing in the past century: the entomological revolution that both enabled and was enabled by the effort to match the hatch of specific aquatic insects across the whole of their lifespan. As Rosenbauer points out, for much of the modern history of fly fishing, especially in the United States, what was hatching didn’t matter — just catching did. People mostly fished subsurface flies — wet flies or streamers — chosen because they worked, and the anglers didn’t much care why they did so, as the flies in Mary Orvis Marbury’s Favorite Flies and Their Histories (1892) and Ray Bergman’s Trout (first edition, 1938) attest. That’s despite anything being done by those snobs on the chalk streams of England and even despite the efforts of Theodore Gordon and George M. L. LaBranche to adapt the dry flies of the chalk stream to the fast water of American rivers. The mayfly commonly known as the Quill Gordon got its name from the trout fly, not the other way around and certainly not from its entomological genus and species, Epeorus pleuralis. In 1916, a year after Gordon died, fly designer Louis Rhead could still declare that “the science of entomology . . . is of no actual service to our purpose.”
Nobody would say that today, but today, a lot of folks are again fishing subsurface flies, especially nymphs, because they work, and the anglers don’t much care — or know — why. The Orvis Guide to Hatch Strategies aims to correct that by introducing those anglers to the pleasures of knowing what’s happening in front of them and fishing the entire process in which the lives of the fish and the bugs they eat are involved — the pleasures of matching the hatch. And you don’t have to know Latin to do so. As Rosenbauer notes, today, the angling world is full of books and videos teaching you how to pick the right fly to imitate a bug, with or without knowing more than the insect’s common name. His book is about “everything else” involved in successfully fishing with flies for trout feeding at or near the surface.
To do that, you need to know less entomology than you think, he says, and while the book begins with some practical entomological information about mayflies, caddisflies, true flies (he doesn’t call them Diptera), stoneflies, damselflies and dragonflies, and terrestrials, the bulk of it involves what to do after you tie a fly on your leader and what you need to know in order to fish that fly effectively. “Everything else” includes knowing how trout respond to hatches, how to find trout feeding on a hatch, how to stalk hatch-feeding trout, strategies for fishing emergers and adult insects, strategies for fishing to mating flights and egg-laying events, fly patterns for fishing hatches — or at least, his curated choices for doing so, based on fifty years of angling experience — equipment and casts for avoiding drag, and even how to target larger trout during hatches.
That span of topics includes an enormous amount of information, from how to interpret rise forms based on what the trout actually are doing, to how to avoid spooking surface-feeding fish while wading in position to cast to them, to when to change flies when nothing is working or when getting refusals, to the most important factors in fly design for f lies fished on the surface, or as emergers in the surface film, or as nymph or pupa imitations or soft hackles just below it, since fishing the hatch can involve a form of nymphing, as well.
However, it’s not just information for newbies that makes this book worthwhile, and it’s not only for committed nymphers aspiring to learn more of the art and craft of fly fishing. Dry-fly aficionados will find the book interesting, as well. Rosenbauer takes positions on a lot of the issues that fly fishers probably will never tire of discussing, but he does so without being dogmatic about any of them. He claims no more for what he says than what his fifty years of on-stream experience have suggested, but that’s a claim worth crediting. He thinks the notion that trout are selective is “overblown” and that “there are many other reasons for trout refusing your fly,” most of which involve you, not the trout, things that can be remedied. I’ve been a strong proponent of the downstream dry-fly presentation, which keeps the leader and line away from a rising fish, but he notes that it requires keeping a lot of slack in the line and leader, which can result in missing a strike (I know, I know), and he prefers to present a fly from across a riser, when that’s possible. He points out that a bug in the air appears bigger than the actual critter is on the water, and that if you choose a fly based on what you see flying around, it’s wise to choose a size smaller — or to try to grab a sample of the real thing. He thinks size is the most important element of fly choice, followed by shape, and that color is “way down the scale of importance” because of how trout see: “the resolving power of their eyes is about 14 times less than ours, so even at close distances, the trout see blurry shapes. Picking out exact colors would be difficult under these circumstances.” Much more important is the suggestion of movement achieved by such things as grizzly hackle, as is what he calls “attitude” on the water — “helpless and struggling,” as with emergers, cripples, or spinners, rather than “perfectly floating,” as with adults about to take off.
Rosenbauer has made a study of the rhetoric of explanation — how best to explain complicated things simply and clearly — and like all his Orvis guides, this one is a model of accessible prose, illustrated by on-the-stream experiences from across those fifty years and by photographs of things you don’t usually see in books, such as a trout refusing a dry fly. And he realizes that how one fishes is a matter of personal choice, as well as experience, and doesn’t insist on anything too forcefully. Reading it is like hanging out with a good friend who just knows a heck of a lot about fly fishing and is willing to share what he knows, if you’re amenable. In the foreword to the book, Tom Bie, the founder, editor, and publisher of The Drake magazine, is more forthright. “Sadly, this kind of fishing has become something of a lost art in recent years,” he says of fishing the hatch.
Too much nymphing, if you want the truth But to get the fullest enjoyment out of the world’s greatest leisure activity, you ought at least be able to recognize the most common hatches and know what to do when you find one — pick the right fly, tie the right knot, make the right cast, and get the right drift. If you’ve done all that, then even a graceful refusal becomes a beautiful thing.
And finally, that is what it all comes down to, when you’re fishing to rising trout — the total experience, not just the catching. As a friend always puts it, the difference between fishing nymphs and fishing the hatch on the surface is the difference between sex with the lights out and sex with the lights on. You haven’t fully experienced all the pleasures of fly fishing until you’ve fished the hatch. The Orvis Guide to Hatch Strategies will get you fishing with the lights on.
— Bud Bynack
Headwaters: The Adventures, Obsession, and Evolution of a Fly Fisherman
By Dylan Tomine. Published by Patagonia Books, 2022; $27.95 hardbound.
In the five summers he guided fishermen in Alaska, Dylan Tomine hated his clients. Not all of them. Just most of them. High on his shit list were Texans, doctors, and car salesmen. They weren’t the only dicks in his drift boat. He calls this chapter “The Worst Guide in the World.”
“Let me tell you how bad it’s gotten,” the author confides elsewhere in Headwaters: The Adventures, Obsession, and Evolution of a Fly Fisherman. “Ten days into a two-week fishing trip and nine hundred miles from home, I called my wife, who was eight months pregnant with our first child. Now, any sane person would object to that statement alone, but hey, I’m just getting started. I was sitting in my car watching dusk fall across the Bulkley River, excited to tell her about my day. When she answered, her voice sounded shaky and strained. ‘Someone broke into our house today,’ she said. And my first thought was — I swear — good thing I have all my Spey rods here.”
A dutiful husband, he cut short his trip and headed home to Puget Sound. “But then again, the fishing was lousy anyway.” Steelhead mania often ends in divorce court, where lawyers charge even more than tackle dealers.
The stories of wasted potential, lost careers, and broken marriages are rampant in steelhead circles. I narrowly avoided flunking out of college while dreaming of rivers, and missed my graduation ceremony completely, trading it for a floatplane trip in Southeast Alaska. Add to this the missed family gatherings, the bailed-on friends, the strained relationships, and what you see in the mirror is not a pretty reflection.
He even quit his gig in Alaska to hit the Dean and Deschutes in prime time, even though he needed the income. “The fact is, I could never stop thinking about whether or not various clients deserved to catch fish just because they could afford to travel and stay at an expensive lodge. That, and I was frequently impatient. And sarcastic. And irritable. But enough about my good days. I guess I thought guiding was about fish and it turns out it’s about people. No matter how dumb they might be.” He began to think of his clients as Johns. “If you take something that’s inherently fun to do with people you like, and do it for people you don’t like for money well, you see where I’m going with this. Needless to say, I would have made an even lousier prostitute.”
But a fine and fun writer. His new book Headwaters collects his angling stories and vignettes — some long, some short — published mainly in fly-fishing magazines and even in the Sage and Patagonia catalogs. It is a welcome complement to an earlier book of his, Closer to the Ground (Patagonia Books, 2012), about fishing, family, foraging, and feasting on the bounty of the Pacific Northwest. Fly-fishing scribe, “Patagonia ambassador,” and “recovering steelhead bum,” Tomine is a genuinely passionate angler whose childhood memories somehow all revolve around fishing. In addition to his published journalism, he has also produced a full-length documentary film called Artifishal, dealing with hatcheries and salmon conservation, that can be viewed gratis on YouTube.
In his introduction to Headwaters, Tomine writes:
I think the stories in this book, written across the better part of two decades and arranged more of less in chronological order, show a kind of arc of consciousness I’m just not the same person I was back when I started writing these stories. I’m not the same fisherman either. Priorities change, I find myself looking forward to fishing trips as much for the company of good friends as I do the actual fish. There’s a deeper appreciation for the natural and cultural history of a place, and more time spent watching weather and birds.
Having traveled the world to wet a line, these days, he tries to stick a little closer to home, home being Bainbridge Island in Puget Sound. “Of course, I still feel the stoke of adventure whenever a trip starts coming together, but even that doesn’t come without doubt.”
But the biggest life change was the awakening of an environmental conscience. He began to realize that if he was to savor the fishing in the Pacific Northwest, he would have to work to save it. At first, he didn’t want to think about such things. His wake-up call came in the spring of 2001, with the emergency closure of the Skykomish, his home river, forty minutes from downtown Seattle. The once fabulous March/April steelhead fishery on the Sky had to be closed even to catch-and-release angling that season, after decades of diminishing runs. “I’m ashamed to admit, this was the first time anything about conservation ever crossed my mind. But it hit me hard.”
Wild steelhead were also blinking out on the Stillaguamish and Skagit Rivers to the north, and on the Columbia, steelhead were dying as a “bycatch” in the gillnets of salmon fishermen.
“Those of us who care about such things will need to get involved in politics — as distasteful as that may seem to solitude-seeking steelhead bums — in order to have any chance of preserving what we love Although it may be a bit late in the game, I now understand that it’s time for this steelhead bum to ‘grow up.’ ”
Thinking of Skyla and Weston, his young daughter and newborn son, his writing took a swerve. His first attempt to pen a serious conservation article, he tells us in his chapter notes at the end of the book, emerged over a dinner conversation he had with Wild on the Fly editor Joe Daniels and Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard as they dined on “farmed salmon.” The result was “State of the Steelhead,” an eloquent exposé and overview that reads like a kind of State of the Union address. “How did this happen?” he asks. “The easiest and most correct answer is people,” he says.
It is impossible to place the blame on any one specific factor, but there are plenty: poor logging practices resulting in heavy siltation (most of the famous pools on the Stillaguamish, once boulder strewn and heavily cobbled, now lie beneath a featureless bottom of sand and mud); exponential population growth and the resulting pavement, lawn chemicals, and septic waste; the industrialization of Puget Sound; sport and tribal fishing harvest managed by a philosophy of Maximum Sustainable Harvest (MSH), which fails to account for variations in ocean and stream rearing conditions; the mistaken belief that increased hatchery production could mitigate the loss of wild fish. The list goes on and on, but one fact remains the same: We were fishing for crumbs in the 1990s, and now even the crumbs are nearly gone.
And it seemed to be happening everywhere he looked: on the remote Olympic Peninsula, in Oregon, on the streams of Northern California — even in a “Steelhead Paradise” such as the Skeena in British Columbia and on the Situk in Southeast Alaska, where today’s “bonanza” is less than half of what it was in the past. “The very idea that steelhead are di cult to catch — the fish of a thousand casts — is a myth. Steelhead are actually very easy to catch. The problem is, there just aren’t very many of them.”
But it doesn’t have to be. Wild steelhead can rebound, he assures us — if only we will let it happen. In the chapter titled “The Myth of Hatcheries,” the author argues against subsidizing artificial reproduction of steelhead stocks. Although it sounds counterintuitive, hatcheries lead to fewer, rather than more steelhead. Hatchery smolts released en masse displace wild steelhead smolts by outcompeting them for food and habitat. Hatchery fish mingle and spawn with wild steelhead, tainting the gene pool and reducing the survival rates of wild fish. Inbred for generations and lacking basic stream instincts that come from the pressures of natural selection, hatchery fish return to the river in a much more compressed time frame than wild fish and race to their spawning grounds without pause. Because the largest and most aggressive fish get picked off early by anglers, a “spiral of diminishing returns sets in,” and over time, the fish are smaller and the hatchery run drops by half.
Left alone, however, wild steelhead thrive. When Mount St. Helens in Washington erupted in 1980, sending superheated ash down the Toutle River, everybody wrote the river off for dead. But the wild steelhead came back and adapted to the changes. And because the hatchery had closed due to the eruption, those fish flourished. “In fact, seven years post-eruption, there were more wild winter steelhead spawning in the Toutle than in any other lower Columbia watershed.” So what did the State of Washington do? They built a sediment retention dam and resumed hatchery plantings — and the number of wild fish plunged.
Something similar happened with the Eel River in California, but with a much happier outcome. A hatchery went into operation there in 1964, a year when 82,000 wild steelhead returned to the river. Thirty years later, in 1994, with continuous hatchery plantings, the run of wild steelhead clocked in at only 2,000 fish. “At that point, the wild Eel River steelhead were deemed endangered, and the hatchery was closed. Fast-forward twenty years without the hatchery, and in 2014 the run of wild steelhead returning to the Eel was estimated at more than forty thousand fish.”
Headwaters is dedicated to Tomine’s children: “For Skyla and Weston, I hope you find something to love the way fish and fishing found me.” He remains as dedicated to the cause and as optimistic as ever. “What an amazing world we live in. I just hope the one Skyla and Weston inherit will be at least as good, if not better. There’s plenty of work ahead to make it happen, but I think we have a shot.””
Tomine may have been, as he claims, “the worst guide in the world,” but readers will always find him a boon companion on the water.
— Michael Checchio
The High Sierra: A Love Story, is not about fishing. But the Sierra Nevada is where many of us seek trout, and it is where Kim Stanley Robinson has spent an impressive number of days “rambling and scrambling,” bringing the mountains in to his heart.
This memoir will surely deepen your appreciation for our Range of Light and may lead you to visit its high country more frequently. As Robinson points out, the Sierra is a rare mountain range in its topography, a “gentle wilderness” with relatively easy-to-hike glacially carved basins that tend to have lakes, streams, and sometimes fish. Reason enough to slip a fly rod into your pack. Published by Little, Brown and Company, 2022; $40.00 hardbound.
— Richard Anderson
