Fly Fishing 101

Long before I owned a fly rod, I discovered the joys of the sport while at college. I was a lazy student and often skipped class to roam the woodsy regions of upstate New York, where I stumbled on lots of small streams loaded with eager little brook trout. I watched and envied the anglers casting f lies to them, wishing I could learn to do the same. But no, I picked the wrong school. If I’d gone to Penn State instead of Colgate, I could’ve taken “Principles and Practices of Fly Fishing for Trout,” a course George Harvey taught there for almost forty years.

Fly fishing didn’t exist at the university level before Harvey’s class. Born in 1911, he was inducted into the Catskill Fly Fishing Center and Museum Hall of Fame in 2000. His life is a classic example of finding something you love, staying with it, and reaping the rewards. In old age — he lived to be ninety-six — he liked to recall his first rod, a stick with a string and a hook tied to it. He used it to catch chubs on the farm where his father raised livestock. Chubs are a variety of carp, but not one you’d be likely to eat. They disgusted Izaak Walton, who thought they were “full of forked bones,” and “the flesh is not firm, but short and tasteless.”

Harvey grew up in DuBois, Pennsylvania, a coal mining town in the Allegheny Mountains, where his family moved when his father quit farming to manage a cemetery. He began to fly fish at the age of ten, tying his own flies with the chicken feathers he collected at his Uncle Ira’s meat market. Money was tight, so the Harveys often counted on George for a fish dinner — trout or bass, not carp. He enrolled at Penn State in 1931 and worked two jobs to pay his tuition, developing into a track star speedy enough to qualify for the Olympic trials. He chose ornamental horticulture as his major, believing it would come in handy when he took over from his dad at the cemetery.

But that never happened. Harvey’s love of fly fishing became an all-consuming passion. And why not? At Penn State, he’d landed in a virtual paradise, with forty or so limestone creeks and brooks in easy driving distance. The streams, seldom very wide or deep, might not impress a California angler used to big rivers, but they’re blue-ribbon quality and compare favorably with the great English chalk streams. The Little Juniata River, for instance, holds the state’s largest concentration of wild trout. Its tributary, Spruce Creek, only five miles from campus, is famous for its trophy browns. Its junglelike overgrowth demands an arsenal of casts to secure a dead drift — pile cast, reach cast, steeple cast, and so on.


Harvey’s teaching career started by accident. He attended a lecture by Ralph Watts, the dean of the Agriculture College, who liked to fly fish and offered to teach the basics to any interested student. Though Harvey was already an expert, he joined the dean for the trout opener on Spruce Creek and engaged in an informal competition, catching and releasing twenty-five trout while the dean caught just two. Nobody makes friends as fast as a successful angler, and soon Harvey was acting as an informal guru to a number of fly-fishing profs eager to improve their game.

He created “Principles and Practices” in 1934 while still an undergraduate. The course was an instant hit. Write a paper on Madame Bovary, or learn to cast a fly? It was a no-brainer for most students. Harvey later added two other courses, “Competitive Casting” and “Masters of the Fly,” all fully accredited by 1947. He reckoned he’d instructed thirty-five thousand anglers in his lifetime, including former president Jimmy Carter, who in 1982 published a diary of his trip to Spruce Creek to fish the Green Drake hatch with Harvey, departing from Plains, Georgia, in a camper van with his wife, Rosalyn, also an avid fly fisher, who netted a “beautiful 16-inch fighter.”

He described how Harvey showed him the way to handle the swarming daytime Trico hatches at the creek. They sat together on a shady rock in a meadow and waited for the telltale sign of barn swallows “diving through the clouds of diminutive mayflies,” then waded upstream and cast tiny f lies on “carefully constructed” twelve-foot leaders, a Harvey innovation. The leaders employed a much lighter butt and tip section than usual and were designed to land slackly in an S curve — the swirls, arcs, and circles essential for a dead drift. Harvey’s design is still in use today. You can buy a Harvey Dry Fly Slack Leader online for $5.95.

Harvey was also a pioneer in the use of barbless hooks. Carter expressed his doubts, worried he’d lose too many fish, so Harvey conducted an experiment to ease his concerns. He hooked a trout and put his rod on the ground for a minute or two before he reclaimed it. The trout was still on the line. That was the case nine times out of ten, Harvey explained.

Along with his leader design, Harvey was a celebrated fly tyer. His Spruce Creek dry and Harvey’s Stone Fly Nymph are standard East Coast patterns, while the Pusher is probably his most famous. It’s fished wet or dry after dark, but it works best subsurface when a river is low and warm. Its oversize wings are its most distinctive feature. Harvey preferred guinea fowl feathers, tied concavely to imitate a big aquatic insect. Adams Angling lists a vintage selection of thirty-five Harvey flies at a price of $595.

Harvey’s passion for fly fishing didn’t diminish when he retired as a teacher in 1972. Well into his eighties, he was a familiar presence on his favorite creeks, always ready to advise a struggling angler. His Techniques of Fly Tying and Trout Fishing (1976) is a standard text, as pithy and homespun as Ray Bergman’s Trout and as rich in invaluable tips. His autobiography, George Harvey: Memories, Patterns, and Tactics (1990) is a charming book that charts the course of a life lived in close contact with rivers and trout.


If you’re young enough to be thinking about college, you’ ll be glad to know that the Penn State program still exists. Joe Humphreys, another Hall of Fame member, took over from Harvey and ran it for nineteen years. He, too, is a geriatric miracle. A YouTube video shows him landing a “giant trout” — it does look pretty big — at the age of ninety. He once held the state record for trout, as well, having hooked a sixteen-pounder he had stalked for three years. The program is now named after Humphreys, its future guaranteed thanks to a $250,000 bequest from an anonymous donor.

Other colleges have riffed on the Penn State model, of course. At Seton Hall in New Jersey, better known for its hoopsters, you can sign up for the “Art and Science of Fly Fishing.” You’ll go on field trips, learn the dynamics of stream health and water quality, and no doubt catch a few brookies. Oregon State offers a seven-week course that’s a little more rigorous. Boneheads looking for an easy ride will surely be scared off when faced with “Aquatic Macro-Invertebrate Ecology.” You’d expect the University of Montana to be in the fly-fishing business. It’s one of Field and Stream’s Top Ten Colleges for Anglers and Hunters, after all. “Beginning Fly Fishing / Fly Tying” does not sound like much fun, since it involves exams and homework, but it’s a bargainbasement class at only $14. Colorado Mountain College in Leadville seems the place to go if you want to be a fly-fishing guide. You’ll learn about risk management for outdoor professionals and also earn a certificate. As for the required reading, I’m told Tom McGuane’s Ninety-wo in the Shade, with its dodgy and dissolute guides in the Florida Keys, isn’t on the list.

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