Favorite Flies for…
A series from Stackpole Books by multiple authors, 2020–2022 (so far); $24.95 hardbound.
Nowadays, a world’s worth of fly patterns are easily accessed online, but what we can lose with this sometimes overwhelming bounty of onscreen images is a sense of value. Yes, such-and-such fly looks beautiful, and it hits all the criteria that make me want to tie or buy it, but is it truly effective at drawing hits from fish?
Having an expert recommend patterns is the most efficient way for fly fishers to bypass information overload and obtain the flies they hope will improve their angling success. Over the past two years, Stackpole Books has been helping bring order to the chaos of abundance through their Favorite Flies series of fly-pattern books. Each volume presents 50 “essential patterns from local experts” within a region, with the regions covered to date being the Catskills, Colorado, the Great Smoky Mountains, Maine, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Yellowstone National Park. Each fly, chosen by the author usually through discussion with in-region guides or fly shop staff or notable anglers, gets two pages, more or less, that describe the pattern’s importance and usually how to fish it, along with a large photograph and a list of tying materials.
The flies in each volume are considered fish catchers, and some are also included because they have historical significance in that region’s angling scene, although the emphasis on fish catching versus historical significance varies by author. Or to say this a little differently, “classic” patterns still catch fish, and through their inclusion, they may also bring insight and enjoyment by placing us in an angling continuum that stretches over decades, even centuries.
Without a doubt, the books in this series have value for traveling fly fishers, because they give both a feel for the character of a region’s fisheries and an informed perspective on a region’s flies. That said, each of the volume’s authors has interests and biases that guide his selection of 50 patterns. Different authors surely would choose different selections, which means these books are not the last word on regional preferences, but rather part of what might be thought of as an ongoing discussion. Also, the selections are focused almost entirely toward fishing for trout, and while some of the flies presented can be fished for other species, you might find yourself disappointed if the latter is where your interest lies.
But regional and species preferences aside, for someone living and fishing in California, these books can provide tips for tying, rigging, and tactics that should prove useful on our own home waters. Of the seven volumes, three — Oregon, Colorado, and Yellowstone National Park — focus on the American West, and four focus on the East Coast. One might expect the three Western books to have the most value, given they and California are part of a broad bioregion, with many of the same fish species, insects, and climatic conditions. Conversely, one might expect the four Eastern books — the Catskills, Great Smoky Mountains, Maine, and Pennsylvania — to provide less value, because those areas differ more from California.
Those expectations, though, can lead the potential buyer astray. The actual utility of each book depends, of course, on how, where, when, and for what you fish. Maine, for example, is a state where fly fishers tend mostly to fish lakes and ponds, rather than flowing water. There should be no reason why some of the flies that work on still waters there, such as the book’s patterns for the damselfly and the Hexagenia mayfly, shouldn’t likewise prove successful here. Same with the Catskills book. It is a hilly region in New York where abundant insect populations and the character of the water often place an emphasis on hatch matching; effective flies there have been tested over many years and have thus found their way into fly boxes across the country. Less well traveled are the patterns of the Great Smoky Mountains, where poverty often led fly tyers to make do with commonly available materials. The patterns from this region remind us that impressionistic or attractor flies, irrespective of place of origin, have great value for tumbling creeks and other waters that hold opportunistic fish.
As for myself, I’m particularly interested in caddis pupae and adults, so I sought to glean from these volumes ideas that I could apply in my own tying and fishing. If you aren’t planning on visiting the Favorite Flies regions, drilling down on specifics like this might be the wisest way to make use of these books.
Still, of the seven titles, those that have the broadest general utility for California fly fishers are the Pennsylvania and Colorado books. These two states have long been hotbeds for innovation in fly fishing, and this certainly is true for fly design. The authors of both books identify, in their introductions, classic patterns that remain successful in their states, but because these flies are so well known, their discussions stay relegated to the introduction, allowing both authors instead to emphasize 50 additional flies that are either lesser-known patterns that they believe successfully match form with function or are notably useful tweaks to classic patterns. Although some of the flies may be familiar, the patterns in both volumes deserve study by California fly fishers and fly tyers.
These two volumes, however, differ in their inclusivity. Some of the flies in the Pennsylvania book come from outside the state, and have proven their value on Pennsylvania waters and have become favorites of fly fishers there. The Colorado book includes only flies from tyers who reside in Colorado or who visit for lengthy periods, thus removing from consideration favorite flies that originate elsewhere. (The Oregon book is similarly constrained.) This omission of in-region favorites developed by out-of-region tyers might lead fly fishers toward patterns that are less effective than they could be using.
Then again, such an omission can be seen as minor, since all the flies presented are said to catch fish. What is perhaps most important is that by giving us a feel for the differences and similarities between successful fly patterns from around the country, the Favorite Flies series meaningfully broadens the ongoing conversation about what works and what doesn’t with regard to fly design and angling tactics. As Mark Twain might have said, had he fly fished: “Bait is for fishing, flies are for arguing over.
— Richard Anderson
Classics Revisited
With Michael Checchio
“Fishing Like a Predator,” by Ken Miyata, Fly Fisherman, volume 16, number 1 (December 1984)
The article can be read online at FlyFisherman.com.
Whoever said, “There isn’t a Harvard graduate who can do ten pushups or change a flat tire” never met Ken Miyata. Miyata was a fly-fishing wizard who could average 70-fish days. Few of his angling companions could keep up with him, not even the legendary Jack Gartside. “Ken Miyata played a trout stream the way Willie Mays played centerfield,” wrote Denis Collins in the Washington Post. “We didn’t know how good he was,” recalled Barbara Wu, his friend and fellow Harvard alum, remembering a day when Ken invited a few of his grad-school buds to tag along with him for some trout fishing on the Battenkill in upstate New York. “Ken waded in and started casting,” she said, “and within ten minutes most of the other fishermen had gotten out of the river and were sitting on the banks, watching him.” Fishing companion Mark Stolt told Harvard Magazine that he witnessed Miyata catch and release 73 trout in a single four-hour session on the river. “I’d be getting my waders on and Ken would already have three fish on,” he said.
Miyata’s death from drowning, at age 32, in a freak wading accident on the Bighorn River in Montana, in October 1983, sent shock waves through the close community of fly fishers, and the loss to the world of angling was deemed incalculable. Miyata was viewed by everyone who knew him as a fly-fishing polymath. He combined the scientific acumen of a naturalist with a talent and a passion for fishing that few could match.
Born in Los Angeles and growing up in nearby Covina, Miyata was introduced to angling by his father, a worm-and-bobber fisherman, and by an uncle who had a potato farm in Idaho. Early on, the boy gravitated to fly fishing, fascinated by its complexities and challenges. By age 12, he was tying all his own trout flies. Miyata majored in biology at UC Berkeley while making a living selling his custommade flies through a mail-order business that he ran himself. Graduating summa cum laude in 1973, he embarked on a peripatetic career as a fishing nomad and trout bum while also pursuing his graduate studies at Harvard. His masterful articles on trout strategy — often illustrated by his own excellent streamside photographs — began appearing in important angling journals such as Fly Fisherman.
Juggling Harvard grad school with trips to trout streams all over the United States, Miyata rolled with the seasons, making fly fishing’s informal circuit from Eastern trout rivers in the springtime to blue-ribbon waters in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming in the summer. Car camping and subsisting largely on junk food while freelancing fishing articles and crashing with angling friends, Miyata immersed himself in a world of trout and mayflies.
Whenever he caught a trout, he would jot down the particulars in a notebook and later log the details onto a home computer that he built out of spare Radio Shack parts and an IBM Selectric typewriter. His goal was to average 200 fishing days annually. “I used to stare at a tiny dry fly on the big, sun-drenched flats of the Henry’s Fork from six in the morning to nine at night, so intent on the fishing that I forgot to eat,” he wrote in Fly Fisherman magazine. “This could go on for weeks, and at the end of each day I would crawl back to my car, hungry, dehydrated, and sunburned. I enjoyed myself immensely at the time, scarcely noticing the headaches and blurred vision.”
Wisely, he cooled his jets before a complete burnout and began taking breaks between hatches, eating a streamside lunch and taking time to chat with fellow anglers. But always his eyes were scanning the river, looking for the movements of trout. In between all the fishing, Miyata took monthly trips to rainforests in Ecuador for fieldwork on a dissertation he was writing on the diversity and ecology of lizards. In 1980, he got his PhD in zoology from Harvard, his specialty herpetology, and then took a postdoctoral fellowship with the Smithsonian Institute for research on tropical frogs. Four or five days a week, after clocking out at the Smithsonian, he would drive to Maryland or Pennsylvania to get in a few hours of trout fishing.
Miyata had every reason to be in high spirits in the summer of 1983. He had completed a book on tropical rainforests, to be published by Scribner, and had begun to write a second book about local trout streams. He had just accepted a “dream job” with the Nature Conservancy as a biologist and researcher to help inventory land in Central and South America. And he had gotten engaged to his longtime girlfriend. Knowing that his new gig would limit him to only a few months of fishing a year, Miyata set out in October on what a friend described as a kind of “farewell tour,” a last angling binge in Montana before taking on his new duties.
Miyata was known to be a strong and skillful wader, so friends were shocked to hear he had been reported missing, his empty car found parked along the Bighorn, where he had been fishing by himself. Five days later, his corpse was pulled out of the river downstream from a treacherous rapid known as the Meat Hole, his rod gripped in his hand, the line wrapped entirely around his body. Angling friends speculated that he had been wading down the shallow center of the rapid and had slipped, the water filling his waders, the current dragging him downstream.
Tropical Nature: Life and Death in the Rain Forests of Central and South America, by Adrian Forsyth and Ken Miyata, came out the following spring. It was an immediate critical and popular hit in its field and remains in print to this day. Here is what famed biologist and ecologist E. O. Wilson had to say about it: “Tropical Nature is superior by virtue of its freshness and authority. It is an account of the extraordinary richness of the tropical forests by two gifted young biologists who have recently experienced it and are experts on the subject. They write with the crispness of journalists sending dispatches from the field.”
It was to be Miyata’s only book. Those looking for his insights on trout fishing and streamside entomology will have to search the back issues of fishing magazines.
His most famous article is “Fishing Like a Predator,” which appeared posthumously in the December 1984 issue of Fly Fisherman. In this essay, he urges fly fishers to think from the viewpoint not only of trout, but also the predators such as kingfishers and ospreys that hunt them. But the article is also a kind of meditation on the mystery behind our own innate abilities and what distinguishes the truly skilled from the merely competent. He concludes that whatever it is can’t be taught, but can be cultivated.
“I used to think that it couldn’t be learned,” he wrote, “that it might be a part of the genetic hardware we’re saddled with at conception, but I’ve come to modify this simplistic sociobiological notion. While I still doubt that this predatory intensity can be learned in the conventional sense, I now think there are ways in which you can cultivate your latent predatory attitude.”
He noted that alpha anglers share a few common characteristics. Most skilled anglers don’t fuss around with their tackle or waste time with the ritual of rigging up, being always prepared in advance to hit the stream. Nor do they vary their outfits. “My friend Jack Gartside uses the same outfit to fish both giant weighted streamers and delicate dry flies.”
“If you want to go beyond competence, if you want to become a truly skilled fly fisher, there are better models to seek in nature than the fish themselves.”
Ken Miyata
More noteworthy is their heightened sense of visual acuity. “The one concrete skill that distinguishes the competent fly fisher from the gifted is the ability to see fish. Anyone can see fish in flat pools or on calm ponds, but even experienced fly fishers often miss the subtle rises of large trout in fast currents. Even if you know what to expect and where to look, they are easy to miss.”
Harder to spot are trout that aren’t rising at all. “It’s no accident that trout are difficult to see from the surface and it’s no coincidence that wild fish are more difficult to spot than hatchery fish. . . . You must learn to look through the water in order to see them.”
Alpha anglers hone their visual skills by putting themselves in the frame of mind of a trout that responds to stimuli and to the predators that feed on them. “Think like a fish” is a useful maxim, although not one to be taken literally.
It obscures one central fact. Fish are fish and anglers are people. Fish don’t think — they react. They react in one way to food, in other ways to possible mates and competitors, and in other ways to potential predators. These reactions are largely innate, the product of long evolutionary histories, although there is no question that fish are also capable of some kind of learning. But fish simply don’t think, at least not in the same sense that we do, and thinking like a fish is really a metaphor for understanding their basic biology and natural history. To be effective, you must think like a fish, but you cannot think as a fish.
Instead, fly fishers can up their game by looking at the river from the viewpoint of predators. “If you want to go beyond competence, if you want to become a truly skilled fly fisher, there are better models to seek in nature than the fish themselves.”
Take kingfishers and ospreys. A kingfisher is what biologists call a “sit-andwait” predator. Ospreys are “searchers.” Each has something to teach fly fishers by way of example. A kingfisher finds a convenient perch and hunts efficiently by wasting little energy. Ospreys hunt on the move and scan lots of water. “Despite their contrasting strategies, kingfishers and ospreys approach fishing with a single-minded intensity that characterize efficient predators. Their eyes are riveted to the waters — they know precisely what they’re looking for and their attention doesn’t lag until they find it.”
Theirs might be a game of life and death and ours only a game, but the very best fly fishers always remind Miyata of efficient predators. “These anglers approach the water with an intensity that rarely relaxes. It is this predatory intensity, this singleness of purpose, that sets these anglers apart from the crowd.”
It can be cultivated, sure, but it also sounds exhausting. It has been said that birds are only hours away from starvation. Don’t some of us fish to relax? Miyata gets it. You might catch bigger fish and a lot more of them, he writes, but that doesn’t mean you’ll enjoy fishing more.
“The predatory intensity I’ve discussed may not sound like much fun and it certainly isn’t necessary to become a contented angler. Among the people I enjoy fishing with most are a few tremendously gifted anglers and others who are gloriously inept, but I can’t say whether one group enjoys the sport more than the other. I know that I enjoy the company of both equally. My friends who don’t fish well simply pack more pleasure into each fish. And I notice they spend as much time looking at the trees and hills.”
Predatory intensity waxes and wanes. Perhaps one can indeed cultivate a predatory attitude, but I’d guess it’s mostly a question of temperament. And hard to maintain if you’re not born to it. I wonder if maybe Miyata’s first intuition was correct — that it’s mainly genetic hardwiring. I suspect that at the moment the sperm meets the egg, a billion decisions have already been made. But I’m not a biologist. And there was never any chance of me getting into Harvard.
I would bet this much is true, though. Anglers like Miyata are born and not made.
