Single-Handed Spey Casting, second edition By Simon Gawesworth. Published by Stackpole Books, 2022; $34.95 softbound.
If you fly fish with a long, doublehanded rod (longer than the single-handed rods most of us fish with), you are likely using it to gain distance with your casts and perhaps also to cover water where obstacles prevent back-casting. It’s a type of fly fishing known as Spey, for the River Spey in Scotland, where two-handed rods have long been in use. Rather than cast overhead with the same back-andforth motions that we use with our single-handed rods, Spey anglers rely on variations of the roll cast to present the fly to the fish. Originally a mostly European mode of angling, fly fishing with Spey tackle has become increasingly popular in our country, notably on the steelhead rivers of the Pacific Northwest.
An aspect of Spey few of us realize, though, is that its casts can be performed with single-handed rods. As Simon Gawesworth points out in Single-Handed Spey Casting, these casts are tremendously helpful for presenting a fly to fish where overhead casts might not do the job well. He pegs this utility with the book’s subtitle: Solutions to Casts, Obstructions, Tight Spots, and Other Casting Challenges to Real-Life Fishing. Spey casts are not just for tall rods and big water, they can help solve problems that all of us face when fishing trout streams with our 9-footers.
Bud Bynack reviewed the first edition of Single-Handed Fly Fishing back in our May/June 2011 issue. He found it one of the better books at teaching the mechanics of casting, “ beautifully produced,” and “extremely helpful” in improving his casting skills. To give you a sense of the book’s value and character, here are two paragraphs from Bud’s review:
In addition to the roll cast, switch cast, single Spey, and double Spey that constitute the traditional canon of Spey casts, Gawesworth teaches a number of casts of his own devising, many of which have become part of the modern Spey caster’s repertoire — the snake roll, snap T, and dry-fly Spey, plus specialty casts not exclusively part of the double-handed Spey canon: the side cast, shepherd’s crook, reach cast, aerial mend, slack-line cast, and some casts constructed by adding together other casts, along with casts that add distance, from the double haul to the poke cast, and other refinements usually employed only by Spey casters. Gawesworth makes all these casts seem like reasonable things to do with a fly rod, because they are.
And
Gawesworth, a former tournament caster, is both a casting instructor and the son of a casting instructor, and as many great teachers do, he has refined his explanations through long experience of what makes sense to students and what doesn’t. He begins with an explanation of casting basics that establishes a vocabulary for the instruction that follows, including a division of casts into “to-and-fro casts” (including the overhead cast) and “continuous motion casts” — those with water-borne anchors and airborne anchors that help load the rod (the traditional Spey casts and some of the innovations). However, instead of beginning with the roll cast, the basis of the traditional Spey casts, he starts with what he calls the “catch cast” — a way to pop a fly out of the water at the end of a drift and have it sail right into your hand. That’s indicative of the playful spirit and tone of the book.
The recently published second edition of Single-Handed Fly Casting improves an already excellent book. Gawesworth revises photos and adds text and also includes two new chapters. One is on “nymph pitch casting,” also known as the tuck cast, which will allow a nymph to plummet into the water and gain depth and a natural drift quickly. (It’s a common cast for fly fishers who use monofilament-only lines, such as Euro nymphers.) The other new chapter is on cast stringing — “the act of taking part of one cast and adding part of a different cast to create a brand-new cast.” Gawesworth provides eight combined-cast solutions for situations that present problems both behind and in front of the angler. An example is when back-cast room is constrained (the problem behind) and the fish are holding beneath overhanging branches along the opposite bank (the problem in front). Gawesworth’s solution might be to combine a roll cast with a side cast, and maybe even add other tweaks, such as a haul if additional distance is needed. In a way, this chapter highlights the impressive utility of Single-Handed Fly Casting. Not only does it offer a variety of likely unfamiliar casts to help you reach fish with your one-handed rod, but the effectiveness of these casts can be enhanced by combining different elements to deal with tactical needs.
Bud had mentioned in 2011 that fly casting is not easy to teach in a book. “Any book that attempts to teach any kind of casting,” he observed, “confronts the problem that what’s involved is kinesthetic, not intellectual — coordination and muscle memory, not brainpower and conceptual understanding.” He is of course correct, but I’m the sort of learner who needs the conceptualization. Much of my casting has been self-taught, and I’ve found that it helps immensely to know the why behind the motions I’m trying to make. Gawesworth’s book is superb at describing the important aspects of each cast and at explaining what’s going on with the rod and the caster.
The bottom line is that Single-Handed Fly Casting is an extremely helpful, easy-to-use instructional tool. Each cast gets a chapter, at the beginning of which is a small call-out box that highlights when to use the cast, and each chapter also gives advice on how to troubleshoot the cast if you’re experiencing difficulty with it. The book’s images show the essential motions and geometry needed to make the casts, and clean, simple drawings add to the lessons taught by the clean, simple text and photos. If you fish a single-handed rod and are at all interested in maximizing your casting ability and thus your effectiveness as an angler, get this book.
— Richard Anderson
Trout Spey & The Art Of The Swing
By Steven Bird. Published by Swing the Fly Press, 2022; $75.00 hardbound.
Steven Bird lives along a huge river, the upper Columbia in northeastern Washington. Fishing it well requires long casts and long drifts of the fly, and unless trout are actively showing at the surface, the most efficient way to cover water and entice the interest of unseen fish is by swinging a fly downstream through the river’s flow. Big water, long casts and drifts, swung flies — these three criteria suggest the use of a longer than usual rod and lines designed to achieve distance. Add in another variable, limited room for back casts, and the choice of gear becomes obvious: a two-handed Spey rod for making “anchor point” casts (basically, a set of casts that somewhat resemble the roll cast), rather than the overhead cast typical for single-handed rods.
Bird didn’t hit upon this solution immediately, but rather came to it methodically, through evolving iterations of tackle as he pursued his quest to reach fish that always seemed out of reach. Bird’s expertise — and expert he is — was gained through many years of fishing, questioning, experimenting. His new book, Trout Spey & The Art Of The Swing, represents the culmination of his time spent swinging wet flies with Spey gear. If you already fish for trout with a two-handed rod, you’ll find solid advice that will surely improve your game. On the other hand, if trout Spey is something that intrigues you, but you haven’t yet attempted this method of fly fishing, the book provides enough introductory material to hoist you at a fair pace up the learning curve and get you outfitted with the right gear. Bird, for example, demystifies the subject of fly lines for Spey rods, always a topic of confusion for fly fishers making the transition from single-handed rods, and he describes the rod characteristics you should seek and suggests how match the reel to the rod and the line.
Aside from Bird’s discussion of Spey tackle, though, most of the instruction and recommendations in Trout Spey & 7he Art Of 7he Swing is useful irrespective of whether you fish a two-handed rod or single-handed rod. As someone who enjoys swinging wet flies, but whose home waters don’t require a two-handed rod, I found this universality a strength of the book. Bird succinctly describes each of the components of the swung-fly presentation — the drift, the hitch-down, the swing, the dangle (or hang-down), the drop-back, and the walk-down. He tells how to read water with an eye for swinging the fly, describes how seasons affect aspects of presentation, examines the 10 major hatches for which swung flies are particularly effective (stoneflies, craneflies, carpenter ants, Blue-Winged Olives, the Mother’s Day Caddis, Pale Morning Duns, March Browns, Spotted Sedges (Hydropsyche), Green Drakes, and the October Caddis), and provides theory and patterns for tying more than 130 specific flies.
The chapter on fly patterns, titled “Flies for the Game,” gorgeously photographed and representing 60 percent of the book, is where Trout Spey & 7he Art Of 7he Swing best displays its uniqueness. Yes, Bird is an expert, but he is an idiosyncratic expert, having developed a set of angling preferences that, while successful, also reflect his history, his values, perhaps even his personality. The flies he likes usually have at least one element, and often the whole kaboodle, planted firmly in the past, and I suspect a few of the patterns he presents were in use prior to the Industrial Revolution. Although Bird does not eschew synthetic materials such as ice dubbing, natural materials are a primary presence in the flies he highlights. Dressings are usually sparse, allowing the fly to sink more quickly and better mimic the naturals. Colors tend toward the somber, although many of the flies do employ traditional or modern ways of adding fish-attracting flash, hues, and hot spots. Weight mostly derives from the hook itself, rather than a bead or a shank wrap, with depth instead achieved through sink tips or weighted imitative droppers, such as Bird’s Depthcharge Worm. Cements and other chemicals are rarely applied. And the overall appearance is of impressionistic bugginess or fishiness (“simulation”), rather than exacting imitation.
What this book is, is Steven Bird’s directions for fishing and tying wet flies for trout. The author’s voice is obvious, the perspective and opinions those of a singular individual who has made the effort to understand what works. Contrary to contemporary biases, what works can be patterns and approaches that have been in use for hundreds of years. Bird’s book is not an exercise in nostalgia, but rather an exploration of what is successful.
Fly fishing revolves around trying to figure out what the fish are saying, which means there is also an ongoing conversation between its practitioners. Bird is telling us what he has learned so far, and it is well worth knowing.
P.S. As for practitioners differing in their preferences, Bird says that if he “was fishing the entire trout world and could only have one two-hander, the most useful and versatile for meeting the sized rivers most of us fish, most of the time, is an 11-foot to 13-foot #4 Spey with a grain window of about 280-380 grains.” Simon Gawesworth would go a little lighter, with a 3-weight Spey, likely an 11-footer for 250 to 300 grains, as implied by a photo in Single-Handed Spey Casting. “Fantastic for trout fishing,” he says, “particularly if swinging soft hackles or fishing streamers in the fall.”
Steve Bird’s Trout Spey & The Art Of The Swing can be ordered through www. swingthefly.com.
— Richard Anderson
Classics Revisited
With Michael Checchio
Silent Seasons: 21 Fishing Adventures by 7 American Experts
Edited and illustrated by Russell Chatham. Published by E.P. Dutton, 1978.
Silent Seasons is a fishing anthology for those who appreciate great writing as much as good fishing. “You can’t say enough about fishing,” observes Thomas McGuane early on in the book. He and his fellow authors then go on to prove it in highly interesting and unexpected ways, for fishing, we are told, is a way to both enliven and complicate life.
The slim anthology, first published in 1978 and edited and illustrated by McGuane’s friend, the artist and angler Russell Chatham, is a volume that could hold pride of place on any angler’s bookshelf. It is a compilation of fishing stories so full of genuine emotion and told with so much verve and wit that it transcends the genre.
The “experts” are, foremost, writers and artists who happen to equate fishing with life itself. Only one writer in the mix, Charley Waterman, could be said to be a square John in a room full of waygone cats. The rest are hippies with fly rods. Fly fishing was still regarded then as somewhat elitist, and the young Turks in the book were rebels working outside the system. Where others were snobs, they were smartasses. As McGuane puts it, “Though the sport of kings, it’s just what the deadbeat ordered.”
Chatham provides the introductions all around, in both words and in his softpencil sketches that render their distinctive portraits. Each author contributes a trio of stories to the book, mainly in the form of a personal essay. It’s a Who’s Who in outdoor literature: Thomas McGuane, William Hjortsberg, Jack Curtis, Harmon Henkin, Charles Waterman, Jim Harrison, and Chatham himself. McGuane and Harrison at the time were rising literary stars, and Chatham was then approaching the height of his fame as one of the world’s foremost landscape painters.
McGuane (Ninety-two in the Shade) and Harrison (Legends of the Fall) perform like virtuosos, but the overall quality of the writing is so high they don’t upstage the other contributors. The curtain rises on three by McGuane in his unmistakable voice, each sentence a high-wire act. The first, “The Longest Silence,” introduces us to permit fishing in the Florida Keys, and it contains what is perhaps the most wonderful metaphor anyone has ever conceived of to describe a tarpon.
The closest thing to a tarpon in the material world is the Steinway piano. The tarpon, of course, is a game fish than runs to extreme sizes, while the Steinway piano is merely an enormous musical instrument, largely wooden and manipulated by a series of keys. However, the tarpon when hooked and running reminds the angler of a piano sliding down a precipitous incline and while jumping makes cavities and explosions in the water not unlike a series of pianos falling from a great height.
(Unaccountably, McGuane deleted this passage when he added the story to his own collection of angling essays, The Longest Silence (1999) — perhaps he found it too rococo even for him — but I’d vote to have it restored.) The second story, “Casting on a Sea of Memories,” a homecoming of sorts on the New England coast for some striper fishing, unleashes within the raconteur a high tide of memories tied inextricably to his childhood and fishing. It is also a powerful reminder to us that we can stand on a beach at the very edge of civilization, with the sound of a lawn mower within earshot, and still connect to the wild on a fly rod. “Twilight on the Buffalo Paddock,” reports on a day the novelist spent hanging out with fly casters in Golden Gate Park, where an angler was actually mugged at gunpoint near the famous casting ponds. “Did they take his rod?” McGuane asks someone.
William Hjortsberg, a genre-bending novelist (Alp, Falling Angel), and a hit screenwriter (Legend, Angel Heart), known to his friends as “Gatz,” follows with three shorter pieces, freely admitting he writes for the money. (“We have all done if for the money,” Chatham observes in his introduction, “because that’s how we live.”) In Gatz’s witty, slightly offbeat stories, we learn that Dan Bailey’s famous fly shop in Livingston, Montana, sells night crawlers and that a Godzillalike creature, the paddlefish, might lurk even in a blue-ribbon trout stream such as the Yellowstone, but only in the lower section, “where the water is as brown as chocolate pudding.”
Up comes Jack Curtis, a starving poet who subsists off the natural bounty of the Big Sur coastline, and we wonder why we haven’t heard of this marvelous writer before. (Perhaps we have, if we have caught his work in Gray’s Sporting Journal.) “The South Coast” is about “suntan angling off the rocks of Big Sur,” scrambling up and down dangerous cliffs to fish hidden coves with hand-held throw lines. “Waltzing Andy” recounts a kid’s friendship with a world-wandering tramp and adventurer who works at his dad’s boat ramp by a lakeside resort in the Sierra. And “Grandfather” tells the story of a dyslexic child’s summer spent fishing in the middle of Kansas with a reprobate grandfather, who might have ridden alongside Wild Bill Hickock. Curtis is a born poet: “Blue as a jaybird, Shaver Lake fits into the Sierras like a breathtaking magic crystal, its miles and miles of shoreline rimmed with virgin pine forest, its air clean and sharp, its water cold enough to tuck up your Goodtime.”
Harmon Henkin displays the most attitude. An avowed communist, he acts more like a Yankee trader in his story “Swapping,” always getting the better part of any deal from a network of Montana sportsmen with whom he trades angling gear and firearms. He writes about the lowly and overlooked whitefish in Montana’s blue-ribbon trout waters and examines the attitudes of a new breed of fishing guide out there. “‘Five years ago I would have demanded that he be shot.’ Raymond Pearson, age twenty-five, keeps his eyes casually fixed on Coneyville Rapids up ahead, mentally planning a safe course for his fifteen-foot fiberglass McKenzie riverboat, a long way from his birthplace in Jersey City.” When we learn in Chatham’s introduction that Henkin died in a car crash, we feel the gap in our bookshelves.
Charles Waterman (Field and Stream, Outdoor Life) doesn’t seem to fit in with any of these hippies. He is completely old school and a true gent. “Charley Waterman is a man who makes you feel you should get a haircut and otherwise clean up your act,” Chatham says in his introduction, “yet he has neither the time nor the inclination to actually suggest you refurbish your credentials. If I ever manage to get the upper hand on my glands, I can think of no life I’d rather lead than the one he and his wife DeBie have made for themselves.” Waterman was one of the last outdoor writers actually to make a living at it, a freelancer for the hook-and-bullet press, and it’s clear from these stories why he was so successful. He was an “expert” who would never show off, and his writing is full of humility and true grace. “My bitterness about the harmless snobbery of trout fishing requires no detailed analysis. I believe it started with my near failure in two Latin courses.” Along with McGuane, the other Bigfoot in the room is Jim Harrison, the revered poet and novelist, who at the time was about to publish Legends of the Fall, a landmark novella that would land him on the literary map of the United States. “Ice Fishing, the Moronic Sport,” deals with surviving wintertime in his native Michigan, and “A Plaster Trout in Worm Heaven” guides us through all the inanities of the annual trout festival celebrated in his home state during a much more clement season. His finest essay, “A Sporting Life,” takes us on a kind of spiritual journey that begins in early childhood memories of rowboats and ponds and ends with the author casting to tarpon while tripping on psilocybin. “It is finally a mystery what keeps you so profoundly interested over so many years. The sum is far more than simply adding those separate parts. In the restorative quality there is the idea that as humans we get our power from the beauty we love most.”
Silent Seasons ends with three chapters by Chatham, and it is almost if they have saved the best for last. “Summer, and Other Small Things” deals with adolescent awakenings on the Russian River while fishing for smallmouth bass, “Sterling Silver” has the author stalking tarpon in the Florida Keys, and “Seasons Now and Then” pays a revisit to the old Gualala Hotel for winter steelhead fishing on the California coast.
You have gone to some good deal of trouble to be here, not only currently, but through years of asking, searching, trying. Now you’re banking one of the jackpots. These cliffs are dark and exquisite, the cypress so expressive they seem to be reaching, gesturing. It is as if they are imploring you to love them The canyon is so deep here that with the darkened sky, it is like being in a cathedral. The light is dull, and you keep coming back to the mossy cliff which seems illuminated.
Chatham writes like he paints, rendering emotion that dissolves into silence. Reading him, you feel much the same as you do when you look at one of his oil paintings and see passion congealing into a stupendous calm.
Many of these stories originally appeared in magazines such as Sports Illustrated, Esquire, Gray’s Sporting Journal, and even Playboy. They reflect a paradigm shift that was underway not only in the outdoor press, but in the larger society overall and certainly within the world of arts and letters.
Six of the seven authors in the book have crossed the river. Tom McGuane, the lone survivor, about a year or so ago, hooked and landed his all-time best tarpon, a 160-pounder, brought to the skiff in a matter of minutes. “I tell people it’s not a world record” he told a journalist, “but it’s a world record for 81-year-olds.” And a piano recital worthy of Carnegie Hall.
