There are specialists and generalists in most endeavors worth doing, and that includes fly fishing. Passion and curiosity send specialists deep into a topic, while they drive generalists to seek new fields to master. Northern California guide and fly designer Hogan Brown is a generalist. As a guide, you’ll find him from the late fall through the early spring guiding for trout and steelhead on the lower Feather, lower Sacramento, and lower Yuba Rivers. But he is also an accomplished guide for fly fishers interested in warm water species, an increasingly important segment of the sport. From April to October, he guides anglers targeting striped bass and shad on the lower Sacramento outside Chico, but also takes anglers on adventures seeking bass, carp, and smallmouths in various lakes and ponds. And the well-reasoned innovations that characterize the flies he’s designed for warm water species, as well as for trout and steelhead, set him apart from many fly designers. We wanted to know how he came by these broad interests, especially with regard to his innovations in the expanding field of warmwater fly fishing.
Bud: You’ve been in the fly-fishing business as a guide, shop rat, and fly designer for a long time — I’d almost say you grew up in it. Who were your “parents” in the business, and what lessons did you learn from them? Did you ever consider doing anything else? And more recently, you’ve started a new career as a schoolteacher. What did you learn from your guiding experiences that translates into the classroom — and vice versa?
Hogan: As with any career, I think that at each level of mine, I had “parents” who helped me out. Mike Fischer, who owned Nevada City Anglers and his mom, Andrea Fischer, were the first to take me under their wings. I would come in with my own mom, and Andrea or Mike would answer questions and help me with anything. My dad fished a bit, but he worked a lot, and most times it was just my mom and me. My mom would help with rides or would help me out with the costs of fly fishing, but she was not interested in learning with me. She was more into a lawn chair and a good book on the side of the river. She was a fourth-grade teacher, so she would even bring her grading, sprawl it all out on the bank, and grade while I fished. I can honestly say, though, that if it wasn’t for Mike’s and Andrea’s early help and guidance, I don’t think I would have continued with any type of career in fly fishing.
Jeremy Gray eventually bought Nevada City Anglers and hired me to watch the shop on days when he wanted to go fish. So Jeremy gave me my first actual job and a pay check, as well as providing the opportunity to learn, because just working in a fly shop was a huge resource. Talking to all the guys, such as Frank Rinella, Ralph Wood, Tom Benzing, and Denis Carlson, people who would come in or who guided for Jeremy, helped me out. I also read every book in the shop. So I apologize if you bought a book from Nevada City Anglers from about 1999 to 2001, because it was not entirely new.
Jeremy also pushed me to get my guide license, which I never would have done on my own. He took me out and taught me with Denis Carlos how to row a drift boat on the Yuba, trusted me to take clients out on walk-and-wade trips on the North Fork of the Yuba, and really showed me that I could make a living at this if I chose. I look back on it now, and I was like 18 years old, guiding people two to three times my age I was so nervous and intimidated, but Jeremy and Frank helped me have the confidence to do it and keep at it. I still remember Frank Rinella telling me that all I needed to have done was to have fished the river one more day than my client and I’d have more experience than them. I still tell new guides that, when they come to work for me or when I mentor them. It’s a great piece of advice.
In 2001, I moved to Chico with my girlfriend at the time, who has since become my wife of 10 years and counting, to go to Chico State. I had been going off and on to community college at Sierra College and Yuba College, and thanks to mass pressure and strain on my parents’ part, I finished junior college.
When I moved to Chico, my good friend John Sherman got me a job at the Fish First shop there, and I met my dear friends Will Turek and Jason Lozano, who really helped me become a professional guide. I would say of all those who have helped in my career, Jason Lozano has done more for me then anyone. He sold me my first drift boat, and I can trace all my major nonparental “parental” influences back to Jay. Jay got me going as a guide in Northern California and gave me the confidence to make a living from it. He opened so many doors for me that I couldn’t even began to list them, from signing me to my first pro staff, to helping get my first fly contract, to teaching me how to fish the lower Sacramento.
Later, Jay introduced me to Mike Costello and Lonnie Boles, who provided a graduate education in the world of guiding. Both these guys took me on as a guide and hired me based on Jay’s recommendation, and they taught me a ton. The things I learned from working with Mike and Lonnie pushed the learning curve for me ahead by years and legitimized me in the eyes of a lot of people who had much more experience than I did at the time. I have based much of what I do and how I operate on what I learned from Mike and Lonnie.
In a business such as the fly-fishing industry and in the guide community, there are always “parents” and people who help out. There is nothing I can say I have accomplished on my own. One of the great things about this industry is that it is small, and we all help each other out.
In the end, though I have to say that my parents were my first influences in the industry, because they were the first to get me outdoors as a kid and to introduce me to rivers. They supported me at every step of the way, whether I needed help with a down payment on a boat, new waders, or whatever. All they ever asked in return was that I get an education so I had something to fall back on if things didn’t work out.
My teaching career came about completely by chance, It’s funny how life leads us in different directions. I slowly moved through college while guiding full time (about 200 days a year) and chipping away at various majors (I switched a few times and took various semesters off), and I finally graduated when I was 25 with a history degree and a psychology minor. I kept guiding full time and was taking some night classes to get a teaching credential and a masters in education, because that was going to be my fall-back career. I realized there was not much else someone with a history degree could fall back on.
When I was around 28, I finally got around to doing my student teaching and was kind of at a transition point in my life. I had been in the fly-fishing industry as a guide long enough to see the strain it puts on families. I had been married for awhile, and I knew that my schedule and program as a guide was not going to jibe with being a good father and husband, and for me, being a good husband and a good father are very important. So I started to take stock of my life.
Right around this time, the school where I was finishing my student teaching offered me a part-time job, and I took it, kind of on a whim, but it seemed like the responsible thing to do. I came to realize that it was probably the best decision I’ve ever made. I vividly remember sitting indoors in January, looking outside and thinking that I would be on the Trinity freezing right now, but I am indoors, teaching teenagers about things that interest me. And I get paid for it!
Teaching allows me to guide 80 to 100 days a year (my school is about half a mile from a boat ramp on the Sacramento) and still make a good living, have a retirement plan, health/dental/vision insurance, and be home to be a good husband and a good father to my two boys. That and I don’t get burned out on guiding. I get excited about my days on the river, because during the school year, I get out only two to three days a week.
Guiding teaches me to appreciate my teaching job, and teaching gives me a break from guiding each week. It’s hard to imagine my life without a mix of both. They both meet needs and fill spots in my life that I know that I need to be filled. Neither one gets old or repetitive, so I am constantly challenged in many ways, and life never is dull.
Bud: You’re not just a trout-and-steelhead guy, but also a warm water fly-fishing guide who also has developed a whole array of interesting flies for bass and carp. Where did your interest in warmwater fly fishing come from? For many fly fishers, it has tended to be a sideline, at best, given the sport’s traditional emphasis on trout, but lately, it’s becoming more popular, at least in California. What principles from trout and steelhead angling have you found that carry over to the warm water game?
Hogan: I got into bass fishing pretty early, because while working at Nevada City Anglers, I ran into a lot of people who had farm ponds or access to small foothill bass lakes, and I took advantage. I would spend all day talking about trout fishing on the lower Yuba or the North Fork of the Yuba and most of my days off guiding on them, so as time went on, I wanted to try something different. It got to a point where going to the lower Yuba on a day off or after being in the shop all day was like going to work, so I started to look for other venues to fish.
Once I had moved to Chico, I really got into exploring and seeing what else was out there, fishing-wise. There are so many options in Northern California that it never made sense to me that most of the guides focus on only a few fisheries and species. I bought a motorboat in 2003, and every day I had off I was in it, exploring the Sacramento for stripers, bass, carp . . . following conventional-tackle bass guys around Oroville and the Afterbay to learn what I could.
When you ask what carried over from trout fishing, the funny thing is that I tried not to carry anything over. I didn’t want to think about all the stuff that I had to do when guiding for trout and steelhead. Again, it was too much like going to work. Striper and warm water fishing appealed because it was something totally different, with a totally different mindset and a totally different thought process that allowed me to fish, be on the water, and get a break from the grind of guiding for trout and steelhead day in and day out. I watched Mike Costello change his business model from rowing a drift boat 200-plus days a year to guiding on the Delta out of a motorboat close to home, and I realized that guiding for warm water species is sustainable. Once you get your first sore back or case of tendinitis in your elbows, the glamour of rowing a drift boat day in and day out starts to wear off. So I began to look at guiding out of my motorboat for stripers and bass to take some wear and tear off my body and keep me closer to home.
Bud: As I understand it, you were originally a self-taught fly tyer, which must help you think outside the box, but you’ve also said that the influence of Mike Mercer, Bob Quigley, and Andy Burk — “the holy trinity of Nor Cal fly tiers,” as you’ve called them — was important to you, not for how they tied their flies, but for “why they did certain things.” What sort of things did you learn from them?
Hogan: Yes, I got my first fly-tying kit from my dad as a present, and one day I just pulled it out and started teaching myself from the book that came with it. Mike Fischer eventually sat me down and started showing me how to tie some patterns, and I learned a lot about the basics from watching Ralph Wood and Mike Fischer tie. Keep in mind that all this was before the Internet really took off and before YouTube videos, so I was reading magazines and books to learn all this and just messing around.
When I look back, though, I learned the most about fly tying and how to tie flies by fishing and watching bugs. That was my Internet and YouTube: watching and imitating with fur, feather, and steel what I saw on the water guiding and fishing.
Very early on I started to tie flies to catch more fish . . . learning about hatches, and what flies did what. I found early on that the connection between tying flies and catching more fish really comes down to understanding the bugs and then how and why various fly tyers do things to imitate them. I knew when I was starting out that I couldn’t tie flies like Quigley or Mercer, but I figured that I might be able to do what they did if I understood why they did it. I would snorkel the Yuba and watch bugs, then look at various patterns and compare what I saw with what the tyers were doing and try to understand why they were doing it. Also, I would play with materials in my parents’ and eventually my own bathtub. Watching various materials underwater, in current, and in different levels of illumination was key to understanding what they do and how they look.
So I learned from observation of the bugs I was imitating, not from imitation of the tyers tying imitation bugs. I think most people today learn by watching videos or following step-by-step instructions online, but those media leave out the whys of fly tying, and people fail to learn how materials behave and how their tying imitates the actual bug in a given life phase. To list a few of the things I learned from Mercer, Andy, and Bob, though . . .
From Mike Mercer, I learned how to design good commercial flies — how to tie flies that could be commercially produced and not easily copied. At the same time, I learned the importance of hook and material selection in imitating the actual bugs. I have always seen Mercer as having a very good eye and connection with what he is trying to interpret in the natural world, an understanding of what he does with his materials on the hook.
From Bob Quigley, the most important thing I learned was silhouette. When you are imitating a bug or designing a fly, nail the silhouette first, then add the flash, color, and all the extras. Work on a pattern simply to imitate the silhouette of the bug, then go on from there . . . that was a lasting piece of advice I got from Bob.
Andy helped me negotiate the business end of being a commercial fly tyer. He helped me with my first contract, deciding how much to charge, and he published an article about one my first flies. I called Andy with the questions that I was embarrassed to ask other people because it showed what a newbie or rookie I was. He never made me feel like I was an idiot or “new” — he just helped me out and answered my questions and talked me through it all.
Bud: You’ve said that you developed your flies in part because you thought that “if I was fishing flies the fish had never seen, ones I came up with that were a bit different from the ones in the bins at the fly shop, I had a better chance of catching fish” — especially when fishing a river behind experienced guides whose clients were fishing the current hot flies. But presumably, you’re all imitating the same bugs. How have you gone about making the same things different?
Hogan: Wow that is a good question . . . I never thought of it that way. I think what motivated me to come up with my own flies was that when I started out, I was always the young guy or new guy, so I had to bring something different to the table. Furthermore, I usually didn’t get first licks on runs, and I was fishing behind veteran guides. I never would fish in front of guides who had been guiding on the river longer then I had, just out of respect when I was starting out.
At the time, most commercial flies left a lot to be desired, so I figured that if I could design better flies, I could make up for my lack of experience. I basically looked for the faults in the commercial flies that other guides were fishing so that I could tweak them to offer something extra or fill a need that other guides’ fly boxes didn’t meet. I looked for situations for which there were no good patterns or for ways I could improve on concepts and ideas that were working, but I thought could work better.
Bud: You’re a contract fly designer for the Montana Fly Company, and you’ve designed a line of unusual bass flies, many of which try unapologetically to mimic the lures that conventional-tackle bass anglers use. How do you go about translating the look and functions of weighted bass lures into effective versions for the fly rod?
Hogan: I think this comes from how I learned to bass fish. When I got into bass fishing, it was a really niche thing, and there wasn’t much information out there with regard to using a fly rod to do it, so I learned from conventional-tackle bass anglers. Furthermore, at that time, if you looked at what information was available about fly fishing for bass and what flies were being used, then compared them with what tournament anglers were fishing, the difference was just night and day. I thought at the time that if these tournament anglers are fishing for prizes worth thousands of dollars, they probably must have a pretty good idea of what works, so I started to model my fly designs off bass lures. I think that nowadays this is a pretty readily accepted concept, but at the time, tying bass flies using size 3/0 or 4/0 hooks with rattles, rubber skirts, and huge lead eyes, lively flies designed to be fished vertically and horizontally, was a radical departure from an olive Woolly Bugger or deer hair popper.
Translating the look and function of conventional bass lures is just like designing any fly. Look at how it moves, operates, and what the fish key on. Many of the successful conventional bass lures are more about how the lure moves and how it is presented. So creating bass flies based on conventional designs has always encompassed not only designing a fly to move and fish like a conventional lure, but developing a technique or line to present that fly the way the conventional lure would be presented. Bass fishing is now such a large part of fly fishing, at least in California, that there is no longer this “us and them” mentality when it comes to conventional-tackle anglers and fly fishers, so most fly fishers who fish for bass are familiar with what works for the conventional-tackle anglers and use and design flies that match.
We can’t always create flies that truly mimic what a conventional lure does, however. The texture of soft plastics or the motion of a swimbait just cannot be imitated with a fly and fly rod. That said, looking at all the things that conventional-tackle anglers do can help. Pay attention to color, size, speed of retrieve, type of retrieve, depth . . . all these things help and can contribute to fly design.
Bud: You also have developed a series of carp flies. With carping becoming more popular among fly fishers, some people just fish versions of trout patterns — nymphs, in particular — for carp. But your flies have a bit of a different look. How did you develop them?
Hogan: I never thought of my carp flies as all that different. I got into carp fishing after I discovered fishing for redfish about 13 years ago. I took a trip with my dad to South Carolina, tagging along on a golfing trip, and I spent a few days with a guide fishing for reds and fell in love. I came home and started to find carp in the sloughs on the lower Sac and in the flats on a local lake, and I just started fishing for them as you would for redfish, and the crossover was amazing. Tracking tailers in off-color water, watching pressure movements to see fish, looking at mud puffs to determine feeding fish . . . it was all too similar. I began designing flies based on redfish patterns and on how redfish guides present flies to feeding fish. Carp fishing and carp literature were nonexistent at the time.
I was just kind of messing around a lot in between fishing for bass and stripers with clients, and some people thought it was really cool. Some people thought it was lame, too, but as this aspect of the sport began to catch on, more and more people wanted to do it, so I got to log considerable hours guiding over carp and designing flies. That said, the original connection was the similarity with fly fishing for redfish and applying all that in my own waters, so I think what you may see in my flies is that they come from redfish patterns or from my coming to carp fishing from fishing for reds.
Bud: You have guided on all kinds of waters, from the lower Sacramento to farm ponds, and for all kinds of species, from stripers and shad to steelhead and smallmouths. This interview will appear in the March/April issue of the magazine. What’s your advice for waters and species that fly fishers should consider targeting during these two months? Do you have any tips on angling tactics?
Hogan: I really have guided all over the place and for all sorts of species. I kind of have guide attention deficit disorder that way. I have always admired my mentor Mike Costello in this regard. Mike always has pushed the limits and driven himself to innovate wherever he guides, even if it is a place such as the lower Sac, where it seems like everyone guides. Mike will find a new way to catch fish, a new type of water where they hold, or a new float. When everyone thought you could catch stripers only on lead-core shooting heads, Mike was messing around with intermediate lines. He just never settles or gets comfortable in one place or with one technique. I have modeled my whole career on that and hold that as my benchmark . . . always exploring and pushing the boundaries.
So that is the advice I would give people. Go try something different this spring. In Northern California, we live in one of the most diverse angling areas in the world. Go take advantage of it.
Bud: You’re not just Hogan Brown — you’re Captain Hogan Brown. What’s the difference between guides who have a captain’s license and those who don’t? What motivated you to seek one, and why is it important?
Hogan: Well anyone who guides on navigable waters (a Coast Guard designation) with a motor (even a trolling motor or kicker on your drift boat) needs to have a Coast Guard captain’s license or what is commonly referred to as a Six-Pack, because it allows the holder to carry up to six paying passengers. It is really a huge hoop that any guide who guides with a motor has to jump through to be legal. It costs a lot of money, and the test is actually pretty hard and has nothing to do with what most guides do, but it is a hoop I needed to jump through, and I did. It sounds a lot cooler than it really is. . . .
Bud: You’re also the marketing director for Cast Hope, the Northern California nonprofit that introduces kids to fly fishing who would not otherwise experience it and pairs them with mentors who facilitate the experience. As both a guide and a teacher, it’s clearly a good fit for you. How do you find kids, and how can people help get more kids involved?
Hogan: Cast Hope started as a Northern California project, but it has grown geographically, and we have moved into western Nevada and are pushing into southern Oregon, as well as possibly moving into Southern California in the coming year. We have also expanded our mission. We now share the outdoors with kids through the sport of fly fishing, not just getting kids into fly fishing, but into the outdoors in general.
We believe that if we don’t create an attachment with the outdoors in the younger generation, they won’t be willing to protect it. People protect things that are important to them and things from which they derive pleasure, plain and simple. If kids are not attached to or derive pleasure from the outdoors, rivers and wild places will disappear.
Any mentor and child under 18 can apply online at www.casthope.org, and people can learn more there about what we do and fundraisers we have coming up, or they can follow us on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter to stay in the loop.
Bud: Here we are at the traditional Silly Tree Question. If you were a tree, what kind of a tree would you be?
Hogan: I would be a big oak tree on the lower Sacramento outside Chico in one of the various nature preserves. I would have a nice long life and be able to be close to the river and safe from any of humanity’s interventions.
