Stillwaters Simplified: 7 Lessons to Help You Catch More Fish on the Fly
By Tim Lockhart. Published by Stackpole Books, 2017; $24.95 softbound.
I don’t recall why California Fly Fisher didn’t run a review of this book in 2017, when it was published, but I came across it on my shelves three months ago while preparing the review of Phil Rowley’s excellent The Orvis Guide to Stillwater Trout Fishing that appeared in our previous issue. If you read that review, you’ll know that Rowley provides a huge amount of useful information on stillwater gear and tactics and such, allowing even novice fly fishers to ascend quite a ways up the learning curve toward mastery, as he sees it, of stillwater fly fishing.
As the name of Tim Lockhart’s book implies, Stillwaters Simplified takes an almost opposite tack from that of Rowley, having the goal of making the task of fishing lakes and ponds as uncomplicated as possible. “This book,” as Lockhart states in his introduction, seeks “to encourage and provoke a free-thinking approach to our sport . . . while suggesting a simplified method, tailor-made for each individual. A good portion of what we do on the water can be subjective and unique while still quite viable in locating and luring trout.” That there might be more than one way to achieve success on a given lake at a given time goes against conventional wisdom. It’s a refreshing perspective.
Lockhart fishes from a float tube (in fact, an old-school donut-shaped tube, although that’s not germane to his book). As far as I can tell, he does not use an anchor (most float tubers don’t, but it’s something Rowley suggests), and he is dismissive of electronic fish finders. He mostly fishes one line, a Type V full sinker, even when the action is near the top of the water column. He says a floating line can cause too much noise in the water when lifted from the surface. He fishes only a handful of patterns, and his go-to fly typically is a size 8 crawdad-colored Beadhead Simi Seal Leech (a simple pattern to tie, by the way). He might fish an imitative fly when a hatch is on, but then again, he might use something else. His basic approach when he arrives at a lake (I generalize, but not too much) is to look for fish or insect activity. If no activity is present, get in the tube and start exploring around the lake, prioritizing certain types of water, depths, and presentations until a fish strikes. For Lockhart, a strike is the fish communicating its preferences to the angler, who in turn should continue with whatever had just worked until it doesn’t. In a nutshell, that’s Stillwaters Simplified. Of course, Lockhart’s approach is a little more complex than what I just described. For example, the season and the likelihood of hatches or minnow activity can influence how and where the angler explores the water. (Lockhart has chapters specifically for winter, spring, summer, and autumn.) His list of stillwater “dos and don’ts” include the importance of trial and error and also of using fast retrieves (both are “dos”) and the need not to linger in a spot when nothing’s happening (a “don’t”). His recommendations, in essence, are straightforward and easy to incorporate into what you might already be doing on still waters. No doubt there are unstated nuances, developed over many years, as to how Lockhart fishes, but he’s clear on the importance of experience in becoming a competent fly fisher of lakes and ponds. Perhaps his most important lesson is to just get out there and fish thoughtfully.
My difficulty with Stillwaters Simplified, though, is that it has a lot more words than it needs — ironic for a book about simplification. I got tangled not in complexity, but in the inefficiency of the writing. Lockhart likes to use meandering on-thewater stories to provide examples of his experiences, principles, and suggestions, but they tend to go on and on, and the points he tries to make in these stories were, for me, sometimes vague. He also includes a lot of photos of friends fishing, but the often wordy captions for these photos rarely provide useful advice for the reader — an odd omission, given Lockhart’s belief in the importance of learning from the people you fish with. I’m also not clear as to how universal some of Lockhart’s thoughts might be or if this was even an issue he considered. His discussions focus on the characteristics of the lakes he fishes in Washington (often, apparently, they are stocked fisheries, and often not so large as to be difficult to cover in a tube), and I wondered whether some of Lockhart’s suggestions and observations, such as the timing of the damselfly hatch, would transfer well to California waters. And if he identified and summarized in one place the “7 lessons” of the book’s subtitle, I somehow missed it. The aforementioned list of “Stillwater Dos and Don’ts” presents 13 lessons.
Conversely, the pen-and-ink illustrations in the book are quite good, and frankly, I like Lockhart’s keep-it-simple and stay-open-to-experimentation philosophy. Stillwaters Simplified has value if you enjoy testing ideas and questioning conventional fly-fishing wisdom, and it should improve the success of fly fishers new to still waters and those, like me, who have become set in our ways. I’m looking forward to putting Lockhart’s recommendations into action on my local lakes.
— Richard Anderson
Was It Worth It?: A Wilderness Warrior’s Long Trail Home
By Doug Peacock. Published by Patagonia Books, 2022; $27.95, hardbound.
When the FBI knocked on his door, Doug Peacock figured it was time to disappear. As the saying goes, it is better to be on the lam than on the cover of Time magazine. Who said that? Edward Abbey? Thoreau? Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount? *
The FBI showed up on his doorstep on the day of the Earth First! bust targeting what they called “eco-terrorists.” (He wasn’t home.) Peacock figured they had come to arrest him for some low-grade monkeywrenching. Five weeks prior to their visit, he had buried his good friend Ed Abbey in the desert, all quite illegally, honoring the author’s deathbed request. He figured it might be wise to fly under the radar until things settled down.
His method of escape was highly irregular: no planes, trains, or automobiles. Under cover of darkness, the fugitive slipped unseen into the Big Hole River in Montana and alone in a drift boat rowed and fished his way downstream for 150 miles to the Missouri River, lighting out for the territory like Huck Finn.
“This vague notion of being on the lam,” he writes, “of being on the run from some variety or abstraction of authority or danger, was commonplace in my life; it had been my companion throughout the years of war and peace.”
Grizzly bear defender, eco-warrior, and (sometimes) fly fisher, Peacock was the inspiration for the f ictional character George Washington Hayduke in Edward Abbey’s seriocomic masterpiece, The Monkey Wrench Gang. Peacock had survived two tours of duty as a Green Beret medic in Vietnam by staring at a map of the Rocky Mountain West and imagining himself there. On his return home, he took to the wilderness for solace, and he found in the presence of grizzly bears restoration for his broken spirit. Because they saved his life, Peacock devoted his life to saving theirs in the wild.
In his new book, Was It Worth It?: A Wilderness Warrior’s Long Trail Home, Peacock takes a retrospective look at his life in a spellbinding collection of stories and adventures. Readers of this magazine will be drawn to the fly fishing, from bonefish in Belize, to steelhead in British Columbia, to taimen in the Russian Far East. The chapter titled “Headwaters,” which recounts his escape by drift boat down the Big Hole and Jefferson Rivers to where the headwaters of the Missouri form, anchors his memoir and could well serve as its centerpiece. For sixteen days and nights, Peacock paddled the 150 miles, surmounting diversion dams, chopping through the trunks of fallen willows blocking the channels, and supplementing his meager provisions with plenty of crayfish from the river and trout caught on a fly rod.
“I’m not exactly a recreationalfisherman,” he explains. “I grew up catching fish for dinner, and that peasant utility clashes with the sportsman’s approach to catch-and-release fly fishing. But here I was stuck on this river for perhaps weeks with way too much time to think. I needed some diversion, and this was one of the best trout rivers in the country.” And the Big Hole is famous for its Salmon Fly hatch.
It was a fine, mild day, not hot, just a hint of breeze, a few clouds decorating an immaculate Montana sky. Rowing along the south bank under the trees, I could smell the sun on the hawthorn, chokecherries, and rose hips, the rich redolence of fruit awaiting ripeness. On the larger boulders — the ones at least two feet above the present water level — thousands of empty cases of big stoneflies clung to the rock. The average length of the nymphs, which had hatched about a month ago, was over an inch. These big, meaty bugs, perhaps the favorite trout food in most Montana streams, lay their eggs in the water. The eggs sink into the gravel and hatch into nymphs. Over the course of a year or two, the nymphs undergo several molts into these big suckers, which crawl onto the rocks or onto the branches of streamside bushes. Once they crawl out, they emerge as adults, providing the most exciting fishing on the continent on dry flies.
At night, hearing trout slurping in the darkness, he was reminded of boyhood nights spent at his grandfather’s cabin on the Pine River in Michigan, fishing to lunker brown trout feeding on craneflies in the moonlight. “Forty years later, standing on the edge of the current of the Big Hole River, I felt all the old magic again.”
At the town of Twin Bridges, where the Big Hole is joined by the Beaverhead and Ruby, the river he was floating becomes known as the Jefferson, and most of the land was private and posted. “This was a small inconvenience, as no one ever saw my camps.” He had another hundred miles to go. The f ishing was so good it began to pall. “By this time I had quit fishing all together. It didn’t seem fair, and I had eaten all the trout and crayfish bouillabaisse I could stomach.”
His odyssey ended at Three Forks, where the Jefferson, Gallatin, and Madison come together to form the Missouri headwaters. Peacock hitched a ride into town and from a pay phone, called his wife in Tucson. She told him the FBI had not been back. “No news about the FBI was good news. I was looking forward to being married again.”
Peacock came by his outlaw attitude honestly. Vietnam was the source of most of his paranoia and anarchy. As a medic serving two tours in the bush, he had seen too much “collateral damage,” a weasel word for civilian casualties, many of them children that he tried to stitch back together. Home from the war, he could not cope. The presence of other people unnerved him. His condition would later have a name: PTSD. To get it all together, he disappeared into the Rocky Mountains.
Soloing in the backcountry of Yellowstone National Park, he took comfort, oddly enough, in the presence of grizzly bears. He felt a deep kinship with the fearsome creatures. Yellowstone’s grizzlies were few in number back then, and he sensed that like him, these bears had fled into the high country to survive. Peacock camped in the outback, soaked in hot pools, and from a distance observed the grizzlies go about their normal lives.
“My contact with park rangers was infrequent and cordial. Sometimes I came out of the woods to fly fish the Firehole River. My favorite bend was the Midway Geyser Basin where hot springs sprang up near the riverbank and younger grizzlies sometimes swam. In October 1968, there were very few park visitors, and one ranger used to leave his patrol vehicle on the top of the golden grass-covered bluff and walk down to the river to ask how the fishing was. It happened to be great, with big two-to-three pound trout rising to small flies. His pleasant small talk constituted my entire social life.”
When the bears went into hibernation, Peacock drifted south to the desert. At Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, he met a park ranger named Edward Abbey, who had just published Desert Solitaire, a book that would become the bible for desert rats and wilderness defenders. Peacock was taken with Abbey’s pro-wilderness, anti-authority philosophy, and the two became fast friends, going on long desert rambles together. Abbey told Peacock how he could find seasonal employment as a fire lookout or a backcountry ranger. The two discussed (and participated in) acts of “monkeywrenching” to slow the tide of “progress”: burning billboards, cutting fences in rangeland, and dropping drill bits down the bore holes of coal and gas wells. Abbey would later write The Monkey Wrench Gang, a novel featuring a wise, old surgeon, a Bronx Jewess, a jack Mormon river guide, and a loutish, beer-swilling, Vietnam vet turned wilderness avenger, “a good healthy psychopath” named George Washington Hayduke. Together, this quartet of misfits, purely in defense of the American West, pull up survey stakes, cripple bulldozers, derail an automated train, and plot to free the Colorado River by blowing up Glen Canyon Dam. It is perhaps the funniest adventure novel since Huckleberry Finn. And the angriest. Everywhere he looked, Peacock saw Vietnam in the despoiled desert.
The problem seemed to be I wanted a life beyond the war zone, but not in the world I had come back to. I wanted to live in the land I remembered leaving behind before Southeast Asia — the grand topography of the American West and Rocky Mountains. Returning, I found it transformed by drilling rigs, power plants belching black death, connected spider-like by hundreds of miles of power lines, with clear-cuts and development sprawling across the mountains, deserts, and plains. After Vietnam, I couldn’t bear the destruction of this particular beauty.
And so he pledged his life to defending wilderness, a soldier “walking point” for grizzly bears and all wildlife in their natural habitat.
For fifteen years, he alternated between camping in the desert and camping in the Northern Rockies, disappearing in late autumn and winter into the red canyonlands of the American Southwest or the Baja Peninsula in Mexico and in early spring migrating back to Yellowstone or to Glacier National Park in Montana to reunite with the grizzlies as they came out of hibernation. He lugged into the backcountry an ancient Bolex 16-millimeter film camera and tripod to capture rare footage of grizzly bears feeding and at play. He used that footage to bargain his way onto national TV shows such as Today and Good Morning America to plead the plight of the endangered ursine. A segment of American Sportsman featured Peacock guiding a delighted Arnold Schwarzenegger toward his first view of grizzlies in the Yellowstone backcountry. In time, Peacock, now with a wife and two kids, decided to give the bears a break from his daily presence in the wild and focus on a way to earn a living. While working as a fire lookout at Glacier, he typed up a memoir and called it Grizzly Years. Published in 1990, it became a modest best seller and a landmark in ecology literature. By this time, his circle of friendships had widened to include such writers as Jim Harrison, Terry Tempest Williams, Peter Matthiessen, Rick Bass, David Quammen, and James Crumley. He developed warm friendships with Tom Brokaw, Yvon Chouinard, and Doug Tompkins and accompanied them and other like-minded adventurers on numerous expeditions into the wild that included a lot of fly fishing.
In British Columbia, Peacock and his friends hook and land steelhead while looking for “Spirit Bears,” a subspecies of black bear with a recessive gene that causes roughly one out of every ten of them to be born fully white. In the Russian Far
East, on a hunt to photograph Siberian tigers, Peacock tries to catch a monster taimen in a river, but gets skunked. There is as much feasting as fishing in this book, with all kinds of wild provender gathered for the table: salmon, Alaskan crabs, wild mushrooms — even a hundred pounds of “slow elk” that feeds the mourners at Ed Abbey’s wake, a cow that Peacock poached from a cattle rancher who was abusing public land.
Peacock has settled into old age, but remains active writing, agitating to establish wildlife corridors for grizzlies, sitting on the board of Round River Conservation Studies, which he cofounded, and sounding alarms over climate change. The title of his book poses a question: “Was it worth it?” He seems to have answered in the affirmative on every page. He has taken his mentor Edward Abbey’s advice to heart: Be only a “half-hearted fanatic” — save the other half for fun and adventure. He’s mostly legal these days. But “Hayduke Lives!” is spotted on T-shirts and bumper stickers all over the Intermountain West. And the doormat at his house in Montana boldly states, “Come Back With A Warrant.”
— Michael Checchio
* It was Nelson Algren who said, “It is better to be on the lam than on the cover of Time magazine.” At least I think he said it. I Googled the phrase and couldn’t find anything definitive.