This is the final part of a three-part series.
The last year I fished the Chetco was 1965. I was all alone at Tide Rock. The salmon were holding in the deep water on the upstream side of the cliff, and I was anchored just back from the drop-off. The swing was perfectly designed by God, I think, to give you a little taste of what heaven was going to be like. It was a bright, sunny day, completely calm, sixty degrees, and I remember the silence, broken only by a Steller’s jay in the foliage below the road and two crows announcing now and then that they owned the gravel bar.
The grabs happened every thirty or forty minutes, the play time the same or a bit less. These were not the attention grabbers of the Smith, but still, they were twenty-to-thirty-pounders strong and bright.
As I recall that day fishing alone, it was odd, and if the truth be known, a little lonely. Bill and I always fished together. Then I remembered he wouldn’t leave the Bailey Hole on the Smith. That was not for me. I didn’t drive what to me was a crazy distance to begin with to get in line. The beginning of the end was in sight for me.
I went north one more time, in 1972, and spent six weeks there, all of it on the Smith. Completely unlike the early years, this was as much a social event as it was a hard-core fishing trip. I quickly admit to having enjoyed it immensely. But it didn’t involve a veritable host of strangers. It was Bob Nauheim, Ben Miller, Frank Bertaina, Grant King, Bob Tusken, Jack Geib, plus a few others who came and went. I guess you could call it sort of a family outing, with nothing but interesting days filled with camaraderie and good-natured social evenings. But that was the last time I ever fished up north.
Thus it was that I never had to see, and had no interest in seeing, what I call “the crowd years,” which characterized the Smith, and even more so the Chetco, for the next twenty-three years.
I spent those years developing my painting and writing in Montana. When I fished during this time, I insisted on solitude and an abundance of quarry. So obviously, I searched out locales where there was no bucket with boats anchored over it like measles. If there was going to be a bucket, I demanded to have it all to myself, or maybe with one good friend.
Fortunately, I was able to afford this extravagant luxury by going to New Zealand sixteen times, British Columbia and Alaska twice that. In between, I filled in the blanks with the Northwest Territories, the Maritime Provinces, the Caribbean, the Scandinavian countries, and Western Europe, South and Central America, Mexico, Iceland, and Russia. In many of these places, you were turning the clock back a hundred years.
When I wrote the brief essay or profile of Bill that was published in Sports Illustrated and later in Angler’s Coast, I had no intention of aggrandizing him. It was intended as an homage to the man I loved more than any other. The fact that it served to add notoriety to a reputation firmly in place for thirty years was inadvertent. It didn’t do him or anyone else much of a service, and the world could have gotten along nicely without it.
The fact is, I missed him tremendously, though I stopped to visit each year. Too, I watched and learned with growing sadness the disappearing act of the anadromous fish we so loved. I could book a trip to the ends of the earth any time I wanted, but Bill could not. To his everlasting credit, he cast from dawn until dark into what had become largely fishless waters, something I simply could not do. And then the stripers went into precipitous decline, and we woke up one morning and it was all gone, the rivers, the bay, everything.
In the spring of 1993, I got a call from Mel Kreiger. It seemed a lodge operator wanted to find out if there was a viable king salmon fishery in the upper Skeena drainage. His problem was that the steelhead season was only four weeks long, from September 1 to October 15. It could be even shorter if impossible weather struck early. So the whole point of this trip was to see if he could add to the front end of this with kings.
Mel knew that the king salmon was my fish of choice, as it was Bill’s, so he asked me to extend the invitation, which naturally I did.
I was quite excited about the prospect of fishing with Bill again, because we had lost so many years. I had no idea where we were going or what we might find, but if there were kings anywhere in the vicinity, Bill would find them and figure out how to put a fly in front of them.
Part of the reason I was so happy is that I viewed this trip as the first of many. I had the financial means to take Bill anywhere, and I pictured his sense of wonder and appreciation as he saw the glaciers and waterfalls of Iceland and waded its beautiful rivers, or the fjords of New Zealand. The only trick would be how to keep him from knowing I paid for everything. But I figured that could be solved.
Then, too, I had obsessed for a very long time about getting Bill’s casting on film. To do this would require a professional cinematographer, the right kind of lighting, and light-colored fly lines so the flat, smooth loops could be illuminated, along with that perfect delivery and fully extended turnover.
For this B.C. trip, I hired the cameraman and assembled all the fly lines, in particular, the older ones made by Sunset. At the last minute, the photographer fell ill and couldn’t go. I was disappointed, naturally, but shrugged it off. We’d do it on the Russian in the spring.
It’s one thing to boast about being a good caster or even have someone else blow your horn for you. But if you as a curious observer are interested in the truth, you have to demand to see the pudding.
If someone claims that so and so is a great caster, then so and so had better be prepared to present the pudding. I once saw a famous professional fisherman put on a loud-mouthed so-called “casting demonstration” at a sport show that would sicken a wombat. Yet about a hundred of the faithful gawked and craned their necks in awe of what not to do. Oh how the big mouth did runneth over, insensitive, gross, and wrong. At the same show later on, Steve Rajeff, who has held most, if not all of the world casting records for some thirty years, gave a quiet, thoughtful clinic at which there were at the most ten people. What I’ve come to realize after nearly sixty years of applying the craft worldwide is that few practice it well, nor do they understand the true dynamics of how to do it correctly.
The fact is, hardly any fishermen, almost none comparatively speaking, have had the advantage of learning at a professional casting club, and, if so, not at one with the pedigree of the Golden Gate Angling and Casting Club in San Francisco. The greatest distance casters in the world came out of there and were always on the cutting edge, technologically. Here, they were able to cross-reference matters with the R. L. Winston Rod Company, also in San Francisco. They had great respect as well for E. C. Powell, but in this case, proximity mattered.
You can pick up fly casting to some degree by osmosis and lots of practice, or more commonly, in our era, by watching videos. But unless you have seen a world champion perform with your own eyes, you will not be able to appreciate them fully or understand how far above the rest of us they are. Without a clear imprint of what great casting looks like, you cannot hope to emulate it. Most of us, close to a hundred percent, actually, do not have the innate physical ability to achieve greatness, but if you want to see how a golf swing is supposed to look, you watch Tiger Woods, not some golfer at your local country club.
I have said this before, and I’ll say it again. Bill Schaadt was not only the greatest fly fisherman ever, he was also the greatest fly caster ever. This last might easily be dismissed as a hollow sentiment were it based simply upon an emotional evaluation of the man I most revered and loved, but it decidedly is not.
The most famous fly caster in the 1930s and early 1940s was Marvin Hedge, generally credited with devising the double haul. He also created a revolutionary new weight-forward line he called “the seven taper.” I never had the opportunity to see him cast, but on many occasions did watch his protégée, Jimmy Green, who was the first person ever to cast a fly two hundred feet. By all accounts, Hedge was good, but when I came along, he had not been in the winner’s circle for some time.
For our purposes here, I’m sticking to examples only of those who actually held the distance world record. Even though there were any number of other terrific casters in the world, none could beat the boys from San Francisco.
I knew and fished often with Myron Gregory and got to study his style up close and personal. He was moved to the back burner, as it were, by the remarkable Jon Tarantino, who held every world record from the mid-1950s until his untimely death in the early 1970s.
To begin with, the most important concept in fly casting is that speed is distance. To illustrate the point, if you fire a rifle that’s level and drop a bullet at the same time, both bullets hit the ground at the exact same time, only one is at your feet, the other is a mile away.
In order to execute a world-record cast, there cannot be even a trace of slack or wobble in the loops, and timing has to be split-second correct. The first time I saw Tarantino practicing, it took my breath away. Cast after cast after cast with no perceptible variance. No mistakes and no corrections. I memorized the movement of his arms, the shape of the loops, the upward trajectory of the delivery, and the textbook turnover.
The next time I witnessed this phenomenon was one day on the Russian River at the narrows between Brown’s Pool and Watson’s Log. Bill had beached his boat at Watson’s and had walked up to the narrows. Wading out deep, he began casting. Normally, when he was fishing from the boat, he positioned himself so that a rather easy-does-it ninety-foot cast put him over the fish. The narrows were a hundred fifty feet wide, so the longest cast you could make was in order, and that’s when I saw the exact carbon copy of Tarantino’s world-record form. I estimated Bill was fishing at close to a hundred and thirty feet.
While his mother was still alive, Bill visited her in the city at Thanksgiving, Christmas, and at any odd time in between as the spirit moved him. Once, while he was there, he went out to have a look at the casting pools in Golden Gate Park at the Golden Gate Angling and Casting Club. As luck would have it, there was a tournament of sorts about to begin.
Frank Allen was there, along with half a dozen others I knew, and he later told me what happened. Anyone could enter, and all the hard-core steelhead fishermen egged Bill on to give it a shot. He begged off at first, then finally decided to try it. This was a so-called “fisherman’s contest,” and the tackle was a nine-foot one-hand rod with a thirty-foot shooting head. The one similarity to a pro tournament was that there was no reel on the rod. All entrants took turns using the same outfit, so the playing field was level.
Had this been a professional tournament, amateurs would need not apply. The one-handed distance event at that level was conducted using a ten-foot bamboo Winston rod and a one-ounce, fifty-foot silk line, a construct with which the experts such as Green, Gregory, and Tarantino consistently cast over two hundred feet. I own the rod and line with which Buddy Tarantino set one of his world records. I had to try it, naturally, and while I managed a back cast of sorts, there was no way I could pull out of it.
The way this informal competition worked was that each entrant had five minutes during which to complete three casts. The outcome was very simple: the longest cast won. About a dozen people took their turns, and their scores ran to a high of about a hundred and fifteen feet.
Now it was Buddy’s turn, and he moved with the precise deliberation of a machine. His first cast was one hundred and thirty-seven feet, the second one hundred and thirty-eight and a half. The third landed at one hundred and thirty-nine.
Bill was up. His first cast was one hundred and thirty-six feet. His second was one hundred and thirty-eight. As he gathered and coiled his running line for the third and last cast, Frank said the crowd of onlookers stood still as if at a state funeral. Bill made his back cast, then
drove forward with a rush of air you could have heard down in the parking lot. Then, halfway to its mark, it snapped back in the air. He had inadvertently stepped on the running line, quite possibly the only casting mistake he ever made in his life.
A few years later, Bill decided to build a garage one summer. He framed it in, then began hauling in redwood logs cut to twenty-four-inch lengths. These were dry, because the tree they were cut from had lain on the side of the road to Armstrong Woods for probably thirty years, not an unusual amount of time to dry out a redwood tree four feet in diameter.
He had a splitter he’d fashioned out of an old two-man log saw and a sledgehammer to drive it home. Shake after beautiful shake peeled off, enough finally to cover the roof and all the exterior walls. I asked if I could lend a hand, and he shot me a withering look that suggested he needed help like a jockey needs a boil on his ass.
Not all that many years later, we were at the workbench trying to fix some switch, and Bill asked me to grab something off the shelf behind me. My eye caught a glint of gold, and when I looked more carefully, it was some sort of modest trophy. It was covered in dust and festooned with cobwebs, which I brushed away until I could read the words “Second Place.” Bill saw me looking at it. “I knew I had that son-of-a-bitch beat by a mile, the minute I released that last cast. It would have been the longest ever made, no doubt about it. And then my left foot was standing on one of the coils of running line. I couldn’t believe it.”
An uninitiated person might be skeptical. After all there, was no proof. But I’m reminded of a moment years ago in a Boston Celtics basketball game. There were only five seconds remaining in the fourth quarter, and the ball was passed to Larry Bird, one of the greatest shooters of all time. The Celtics were down by two, and Bird was as deep as you can get into three-point territory on the sideline, one of the toughest shots there is. He squared himself away for no more than a split second, then released the ball. It had scarcely cleared his fingertips when he turned his back to the basket and raised his arms in victory as it swished the Celtics to a one-point win.
Finally, the day of departure arrived, and as I knew he would be, Bill was on point. We checked through customs in Vancouver, then boarded the flight to Smithers. From there, we took a twin that dropped us off on the dirt runway that was our jumping-off point to the river.
The ride to camp, which would take about thirty or forty minutes, was made in heaven for Bill. Just a few yards off the landing strip were some abandoned train tracks that had been built to facilitate logging in the area. Operations had ceased, and the tracks were abandoned. However, the resourceful lodge operator had put together a trolley of sorts that seated all the guests, as well as their luggage.
The engine was a Rube Goldberg relic mounted at the rear, and it took a little doing to fire it up. Bill was on it in a flash, climbing around and under it while giving our host the third degree. He was just dying to see how it worked and then fix it. Soon, however, it was idling, and then off we rumbled. Clearly, the tracks had not been used since the previous year, because willows hung heavily in our way, and four-or-five-foot saplings grew from between the ties all the way. It was about a mile walk from our “station” to the camp, and the gear was hauled in on four-wheelers. Bill and I would share a cabin.
The first day, we worked a number of pools near and below camp without seeing a fin, and I couldn’t help wondering if we might have come all this way only to find a dry hole.
Next day, we ran quite a distance upstream, presently arriving at a classically beautiful hole we were told was one of the better places for salmon, and by the number of slowly rolling and porpoising fish, we had no reason to doubt it. A guide wanted Bill and me on the outside bank, where there was no back-cast room. I was not sure why, but we climbed ashore as instructed. Fish were showing within forty to sixty or seventy feet. I made sure I held back so Bill could feel free to choose his spot. If there was one thing I knew about him, it was that he had an uncanny sense of where to be in relation to the water.
Forty years earlier, Bill had figured out how to roll cast seventy feet. Essentially, it was a sort of one-handed Spey deal requiring some very precise and tricky timing. I picked it up, sort of, but for every time it worked for me, there were four or five that collapsed hopelessly. With no noticeable change in weather, wind, or light, the salmon began what we recognized as the grab roll. Instead of a slow dorsal showing, there was a fast, loud eruption.
“Oh, shit!”
“Yeah, I know” said Bill. “Stay tuned.” Within not too many minutes, Bill came up on one. He made his way down along the awkward bank until he could go no farther. The fish took line at will, because it was at least seventy or eighty yards out and downstream, so the boat was brought over and the fish came to the net. While all this was going on, I hooked one, but shamefully popped the leader in a careless moment.
Back in position, Bill soon hooked another, which came off. Minutes later he had another, and the landing drill was a before. As he cast, again I watched his movements and was rather at a loss to explain why he retrieved immediately, not allowing the fly to sink at all after the cast landed. I had to know.
“Why are you fishing so high in the water?”
“Why not. These fish aren’t holding in a stationary school. They’re cruising all over the place, and some are on the bottom, some in the middle, and some on top. Since there are just as many up high as down low, I’m targeting the shallow ones. For one thing, you don’t have any lost motion waiting for the fly to sink, and I think the ones on top may be more actively inclined to bite.” End of lesson.
The next pool upstream presented a more convenient opportunity, with no tricky eddies or current and plenty of back-cast room. On his first cast, Bill hooked a fish. I was watching from a high bank and saw the slow, ponderous flashes caused by the head shake. It took some time to land, but no wonder, because it was right around fifty pounds.
Next day, we made a very long run upstream until we arrived at a long, wide pool. As the boat idled up through it, uncountable hundreds of salmon pinwheeled out from under us. Clearly, we had arrived at the bucket of buckets.
We pulled the boat to shore a couple of hundred yards upstream of where we were going to fish, and before anyone knew it, Bill had sprung over the side and was all but sprinting down the bank, rocky as it was.
Not wanting to miss even a minute of the show, I was not far behind, although the rocks Bill had skipped merrily over definitely slowed me down. That first foray to Salt Point came back to me as clearly, as if it were yesterday. Now, more than fifty years later, Bill’s enthusiasm and agility were apparently undiminished.
I was still fifty yards away when Bill set up on a fish, but closed the gap in a hurry. He was backing up and laughing.
“First cast! This place is paved with ’em.”
Seeing that our guide was now close behind Bill with a large, long-handled net, I knew my services wouldn’t be needed, so I charged into the water, immediately slipped on what may as well have been a greased rock, and I nearly went down. Feeling my way carefully, I reached a good vantage point and laid out my first cast.
Halfway through the swing, a grab set things in motion. Backing out, I slipped again and went down unceremoniously.
Out on the North Coast in the Russian, as well as in the rest of the smaller rivers from there to the Oregon border, the biggest rock anywhere wouldn’t even rival a golf ball. How spoiled we were by this sublime feature, but one of the reasons why I would trade California for all of British Columbia in a heartbeat if it were still intact is that no one in my world had ever even heard of felt soles or aluminum cleats.
The first time Bill took me up to the Klamath was when I experienced wading hell on rocks the size of softballs on up to basketballs. Both of us had the same Ball Band waders with plain rubber soles which slid off the moss-covered rocks like greased ball bearings. We started at the Eulathorne riffle, one of Bill’s favorites. There was simply no way I could stay on my feet long enough to get into casting position. On the other hand, Bill seemed to love it, maybe because it was an opportunity to practice his acrobatics. After two days of poor fishing, he said, “This is no good. Let’s go over to the Eel.” What heaven it was to get there and wade those pools in complete comfort and safety.
For four days on the upper Skeena, we fished that textbook-perfect run. I don’t know how many kings Bill and I caught, he more than I, but it was by any standards a big number. Even with the net, which shaved a significant amount of time off the process, each fish was a fifteen-or-twenty-minute ballet. I’ve heard it said there is such a thing as too many fish, but I’ve never reached that threshold. Throughout our stay, each night, when we retired to our cabin, Bill and I engaged in a little small talk just as we had so long ago. Before long, he fell sound asleep, and as I always had, I found comfort in his gentle snoring. There were two candles standing on a shelf by the window that burned with scarcely a flicker. I had paper and pen in the hope I could write something meaningful about him that might relegate my earlier, pretty shallow story to the dustbin of time.
It was our last night, and I thought of the terrific week we’d just had. It was as if no time at all had passed. Bill was exactly the same person he had been years ago. There were no histrionics or adolescent pranks, and most certainly, not a trace of cynicism.
He was the man who still had the boy in him. He met each day with hope and anticipation. Wonder and freedom ruled his life. And insofar as the natural world was concerned, he was one with it in a sense of harmony few ever experience. His instincts of how and where to fish had reached a metaphysical form of mysticism few have ever known.
We were snug and content in our little cabin. Bill was asleep in the corner, and I was staring at my candles as if they were about to burst into song. Bill was a father, brother, friend, and mentor, and I loved him more than I can describe.
But in spite of my intentions, those words to convey this wouldn’t come, so I poured another three fingers of the cognac I’d brought along. I thought about tomorrow, next week, next year, about immortalizing the casting and about the amazing trips we would take. I didn’t know, could not have known, that the terrible illness that would take him only a few months hence had already established itself near his heart.
As the candles burned down, my right hand held the impotent pen, while the steady raising of my left gradually put me to sleep. Soon, blank page intact, I joined Bill in a dreamless state of grace.
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