Out of the Box: Unconventional Fly-Fishing Strategies and Winning Combinations to Catch More Fish
By John Barr. Published by Stackpole Books, 2022; $39.95 hardbound.
John Barr fished for years with only a single fly on his tippet, a practice that surely remains true for many of us. Over the decades, however, he found that fishing two or three flies at a time enhanced success, and, a thoughtful and observant angler, he improved on this success by continuing to experiment with tactics and rigging and flies, so that today, Barr almost always fishes with more than one fly. Out of the Box teaches how he does so when trout are rising, when trout are not rising, when fishing spinner falls, and when fishing for warmwater species. If you mostly or only fish one fly at a time, his advice is thought-provoking and valuable, especially because the waters he fishes in his home state of Colorado are similar in character and forage base to those in California.
The primary advantage of presenting multiple flies at once is that they give fish a choice, which is inherently a positive thing. Providing choices can be especially useful on waters that are heavily fished. “Pressured fish,” Barr observes, “are often reluctant to take a floating adult pattern but will readily snatch up a sunken emerger or pupa.” He also notes that “another advantage of fishing multiple flies is that one of the flies can serve as an attractor for smaller or more imitative patterns.”
The primary disadvantage of fishing multiple flies is that such rigs are prone to getting tangled, something that everyone who has fished multifly rigs can attest to. They are also prone to snagging when fishing tight to the bank or structure. Barr says, though, that “most tangles can be avoided by making smooth, well-timed casts and having the right line, leader, and tippet setup,” and snags can be avoided, or at least reduced, by using just one fly where snagging is an issue. (As someone who has wasted much time with tangles, I found Barr’s advice on casting and rigging both useful and, perhaps just as importantly, reassuring. Although the problems won’t go away entirely, they will lessen if you pay adequate attention to what you are doing.)
Out of the Box proceeds in a logical manner that builds expertise in fishing multiple flies and also deals with particular situations. Barr begins with multifly rigs for trout rising to a hatch in moving water, which is when and where many of us fish a single dry fly. His recommendation is to use a “highly visible” dry fly for the top pattern (visibility is important, because the top fly serves as a strike indicator, as well as a food item), to which he’ll tie at the bend of the hook a short 6-to-9-inch tippet to an emerger pattern, because trout will also be feeding on emergers during a hatch. Having only one dropper fly on a short tippet reduces the difficulty of casting multiple flies, so this is a good rig with which to start learning how to fish multiple flies effectively. As he’ll do in subsequent chapters of Out of the Box, Barr describes the rod, line, and leader/tippet/knots setup that he prefers and then goes into presentation and fly patterns. Particularly interesting, because it’s contrary to the advice of some experts, is that although Barr’s leader for the dry-dropper setup is nylon monofilament, he advocates using fluorocarbon for the tippet from the leader to the dry fly. Fluorocarbon is stronger than nylon, he notes, and while the latter floats better, “5X and 6X fluorocarbon does not readily penetrate the surface film and will not sink your dry fly.” Barr’s subsurface patterns always use fluorocarbon tippets because of its strength and reduced visibility underwater and are always tied hook bend to eye.
The next chapter deals with fishing multiple flies when trout aren’t rising — in other words, presenting two or more nymphs under a floating fly or indicator. Trout feeding subsurface are likelier to consume a broader range of food items than during a hatch, so this is when providing multiple options makes a lot of sense. Because the fish are often deep in streams and lakes, tippets are typically longer than those used with the previous dry-dropper rig, which places additional emphasis on the need for good casting technique. In other words, fishing multiple nymphs subsurface becomes both more important and more difficult.
The chapter that follows describes Barr’s preferred approach for fishing nymphs when trout aren’t rising to a hatch: his “HCD” setup, with which it is “easier to make long casts, get longer drifts, and cover more water than with an indicator or Euro nymph rig.” The “H” in “HCD” is for hopper, the “C” is for Copper John, a heavy, wire-bodied nymph that doubles as a weight, and the “D” is for dropper. The hopper serves as an indicator and food item, and its bulk draws the attention of the fish upward, where they also see a shiny nymph, likewise a potential food item, that leads them in turn to see a smaller, less visible imitative nymph or emerger pattern nearby. The concept of hopper-dropper combos is certainly not unknown among fly fishers, but Barr’s HCD takes it a new level.
Barr is also an advocate for using multifly rigs to catch species other than trout — not just bass and panfish, but also stripers, wipers, carp, and even catfish. As with the HCD, the surface popper serves as an indicator, a food item, and an attention getter that can turn the fish’s focus toward the single dropper that’s on a short tippet. (Barr fishes this setup close to structure.) Bass and panfish tend not to be too selective, so he feels comfortable fishing heavy tippets, such as 0X. He prefers nylon rather than fluorocarbon leaders here, saying a 0X fluorocarbon leader (with, presumably, the dropper fly) “would sink the popper.”
Two more chapters present multifly rigs for trout. One focuses on fishing during and after a spinner fall and recommends a drowned spinner dropper under a high-visibility dry fly that’s similar in color and size to the natural spinner — an approach like the dry-dropper rig discussed earlier. The other multifly rig-for-trout chapter covers trout rising in lakes. Unlike in a river, trout in a lake usually aren’t holding in one spot, but instead swim around in their quest for food, and their path of travel is hard to predict. This places a premium on casting quickly and also on long tippets that help ensure the fish sees at least one of the flies. To be able to cast quickly, Barr maintains a taut line by trolling it from his float tube, which means he’s fishing emergers rather than dry flies.
The final techniques chapter in Out of the Box pertains to streamers. This is not specifically a multifly-rig chapter, although Barr does touch upon using a trailing fly. He offers instead a “passive streamer technique” that “adds another dimension” to fishing a streamer for bass and trout. In essence, a setup composed of a high-visibility floating line, long leader, and weighted jig-hook streamer lets him fish a section of stream or lake slowly and with pauses, using a hand-twist retrieve, in contrast to the higher retrieve speed typical when fishing streamers with sinking lines. It’s a technique that works particularly well with crawdad patterns, and intriguingly, it can produce trout from “the slow, deeper sections of rivers often referred to as ‘frog water’ that fly fishers often pass up or don’t fish seriously.”
In all, Out of the Box will broaden your ability to fish effectively and achieve hookups. Barr’s prose is simple and clear (if at times redundant), and even a novice fly fisher should be able to visualize and put into practice his recommendations for tactics and techniques. And while Barr also provides recommendations for gear and flies, you can apply his approaches with the rods and probably the lines and flies that you already have. (Photos and materials lists for 17 patterns are provided in the book if you’d like to tie or riff on his designs.) Frankly, I mostly gave up fishing multiple flies years ago because of the frustrations it involved. Barr has convinced me to revisit this approach.
— Richard Anderson
The Search for the Genuine
By Jim Harrison. Published by Grove Press, 2022; $28 hardbound.
Jim Harrison is best known for his fiction, and many, such as me, give equal weight to his poetry, but some of us also consider his nonfiction to be almost as vital as his stories and poems. And now we have The Search for the Genuine, the first collection of his general nonfiction to appear in over thirty years.
For Harrison, life was a moveable feast, and he took big bites. It’s all here in this posthumous collection of essays. His love of fishing and hunting, literature, the great outdoors, the pleasures of the table, and the voices in the wine. “The natural world is an enormous mystery and I married her early,” he writes.
The poet grew up on a farm in northern Michigan and spent his childhood roaming the woods, hunting and fishing. Among his earliest memories are rowing his father and grandfather around a small lake while the two men fished, a chore he considered a privilege. One day, when he was ten and his dad took him fishing, Jim left his fly rod in the grass behind the car, and his dad backed up over it. He had paid ten bucks for that rod, doing backbreaking lawn and garden work at fifteen cents an hour. “Dad said, ‘Get your head out of your ass, Jimmy.’ They’re still saying that.”
There was fishing and hunting, but books were a big part of his formative years. They drew him to places such as New York, Boston, and San Francisco, where he wandered the streets as a kind of youthful beatnik. College beckoned, and later so did Hollywood, where he worked as a screenwriter to finance his many novels and books of poetry. But always he returned to his rural roots and his humble beginnings as a country boy.
Strolling over the Brooklyn Bridge one day, with all of New York spread out before him, he thinks, “I could live here, swept away by the splendor of it all, though for reasons of claustrophobia it would have to be in a one-room cabin in the middle of the bridge.”
The farther he gets from civilization, the happier and more content he is.
Now I live in the center of Montana for half of the year, and the other half in the mountains near the Mexican border. Both of these are car-punishing places, partly because I fish sixty days a year and bird hunt nearly that much. In other words I use an SUV for purposes of which it was hopefully designed. I am a specialist in hard rather than soft miles, a sucker for what Robert Frost called the road less traveled. Ever since my youth in northern Michigan I’ve known that it is the gravel roads that lead to the good places.
As a young man, his lust for fly fishing drew him to the Upper Peninsula for brook trout, to Montana for brown trout, to Florida for tarpon (“we’re slightly hungover, but this is Key West”), and even to Ecuador for striped marlin, the more exotic trips financed by magazines he wrote for as a freelancer, all expenses paid. Harrison’s philosophy was “Nice work if you can get it.” “I was pushing myself in my twenties when, as a dry-fly neurotic on a Guggenheim grant, I fished ninety days in a row. Such obsessive-compulsive behavior is supposedly a mental defect, but then I also wrote the title novella of my collection Legends of the Fall in nine days, which I view as worth the madness.”
He practiced catch-and-release angling religiously, but wasn’t pious about it.
Probably about 99 percent of the fish I’ve caught in my adult life were released. I don’t say ‘released unharmed,’ as a creature’s struggle for life is indubitably harmed by it. We should avoid a mandarin feeling of virtue in this matter Eating some wild trout now and then will serve to remind you that they are not toys put in the river for the exercise of your expensive equipment.
Nor was he ever a fly-fishing snob. If the river was too high for Michigan steelhead, he might hang up his rod and go out to one of the Great Lakes to net smelt for a fish fry. It was all part of being a country boy, albeit one who had been to Paris and Madrid and was on a first-name basis with actresses and models.
Hunting and fishing have been a very large part of my life for about sixty years. They are what I do when I am not writing poems and novels. And when not actually fishing and hunting I am running our dogs, bird-watching, mushrooming, looking for wildflowers, and idly searching for berries that I eat as I go. These were all family routines since I can remember and I merely took them several steps further in the degree of intensity I hunt and fish because hunting and fishing take place in beautiful places.
After the glamor fish in exotic locations and the tarpon jumped down in the Keys, Harrison returned to his primary love, the woods and thickets, content to catch brook trout in Michigan streams and brown trout in Montana rivers. This was the sport he found most satisfying and more attuned to his artistic temperament. For him, “trophies” could come in many sizes. The joy of finally landing a twenty-five-pound permit on a fly rod after “a year’s worth of days” spent stalking the flats for a shot at one was no less than the thrill he got from finally sneaking up on a pair sandhill cranes just to be close to them.
If I walk a full hour through the woods to a beaver pond and catch a two-pound brook trout on a no. 16 yellow-bellied female Adams, I feel very good. The important thing isn’t the technique or the equipment but the totality of the experience, of which the technique and the equipment are a very small part. There are the hundred varieties of trees and shrubs you pass though, the dozen different wildflowers, the glacial moraines, the stratocumulus clouds, the four warblers and the brown thrasher, the heron you flushed, the loon near the lake where you parked the car, the Virginia rail you mistook for a cattail, the thumping of your heart when you hook a fish, the very cold beer when you return to the car, even the onion in the baked bean sandwich you packed along. But above all it is the mystery of the water itself, in the consciousness, not the skill or the expensive equipment.
Understanding habitat, he believed, was the most crucial skill of all, far more important to fishing and hunting than being a crack fly caster or wing shot, and that it comes out of being at home in the natural world. “Both fish and birds hang out in their restaurants, but there are no signs out front.”
Harrison died in the spring of 2016 while sitting at his writing desk in his Arizona casita close by the Mexican border, one of his favorite spirit places. The fatal heart attack struck while he was midway through a poem he was writing. You could just as well say he died of a lust for life. “I excel at taking naps, pouring drinks, lighting my cigarette, writing too many novels, and, some say, cooking.” Giving all the fishing and hunting he did — to say nothing of the feasting and carousing — it’s a wonder he got any work done at all.
But he was a giant of American letters. He published twelve novels and twenty-four novellas in his lifetime, along with twenty volumes of poetry (including chapbooks) and five books of nonfiction, including a memoir and two books celebrating his immoderate love of food and wine. In addition, he wrote screenplays, reviews, literary criticism, travelogues, and essays on sport and the outdoors. He has been credited with breathing new life into the novella, or short novel, and has been called “a master of the form.” But his poetry meant the most to him. He called it “the true bones of my life.”
The essays and stories in The Search for the Genuine were compiled posthumously from articles, travel pieces, and reviews he wrote for various magazines and other publications over four decades, including the New Yorker, Esquire, Sports Illustrated, Playboy, and the New York Times. This is for the most part their first appearance in book form, and they are a welcome addition to the Harrison canon. The essays are arranged more or less thematically and grouped around his familiar passions and pursuits: his love for the natural world, birdwatching, Zen Buddhism and other spiritual matters, faithful hunting dogs, shotguns, good company onstream and off, and his taste for fine wines and food and even finer literature. All are written with his ribald humor and zest for life. He once said, “The most important thing an angler can own is a sense of humor,” and he has proven it in these pages.
— Michael Checchio
