I owe much; I have nothing; I give the rest to the poor.
Rabelais
A serious fly fisher needs only two rods. Or is it two hundred?
Recently, I decided to take all my fly rods out of the closet just to see what I own. I have been fly fishing since 1978, and I wanted to see how much gear I had accumulated in the pursuit of a passion. Oddly enough, it appears to be very little. I think I might qualify as some kind of equipment minimalist.
The first fly rod I ever bought was a fiberglass dime-store job for a 7-weight line. My friend Paul Merkoski gave me my first and only fly-casting lesson. This lesson, which lasted all of five minutes, was held in the parking lot of a suburban New Jersey newspaper where we both worked as reporters. Paul hadn’t fished since he was a kid, but an uncle once taught him how to cast a fly rod, and Paul was able to show me how it was done, more or less. Paul went on to become editor in chief of that newspaper. He also loaned me a pair of books on the subject of trout fishing, which I never returned, if memory serves. One of them, I recall, was Charlie Fox’s This Wonderful World of Trout. I somehow got the impression from reading Fox that all trout rivers would resemble his pastoral limestone creeks. I was in for a rude awakening.
I lived in southern New Jersey, where there was little or no trout fishing due to the sandy and acidic nature of the soil and the fact that the rivers were too warm in summer for trout to survive. The cedar-stained streams and lakes where I lived held mostly pickerel and runty bass and were simply unsuitable for trout, even hatchery plantings. So I took my fiberglass pole to a couple of lakes and caught pickerel and other trash fish and had a pretty good time, despite myself. Perversely enough, one day, I caught a rainbow trout in a man-made suburban lake, a hatchery fish that had escaped from a stocked pond by swimming down a feeder creek. And so I caught my first trout on an ersatz fly in an artificial lake where trout didn’t belong. Truly, I thought, I am at one with nature.
That Christmas, I received a gift from my father, a fiberglass fly rod that was custom built for me by a rod maker who lived in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Built from a fiberglass blank, eight feet in length, it cast a 6-weight line, which made it, I suppose, the perfect all-purpose trout rod. It certainly felt much better than my cheap dime-store model, which I immediately retired and haven’t fished since.
The following spring, I went fishing for the first time on some real, honest-to-goodness trout rivers. There are, in fact, several fair-to-good trout streams in the hill country of northwestern New Jersey. I would make a long trip up there every weekend in April and May to fish either the Musconetcong or the South Branch of the Raritan or, preferably, the Big Flatbrook, no doubt the best trout river in New Jersey, but a very long way away and a real pain in the ass to drive to. All these rivers could be described as freestone woodland trout streams similar in many respects to the more famous Catskill rivers a little farther north, and I caught rainbow trout that for the most part came from hatcheries. At f irst, I fished mostly on the Musconetcong in its special fly-fishing only section. But later I developed a preference for fishing the South Branch of the Raritan in a picturesque and rather wild-looking ravine, the Ken Lockwood Gorge, named in honor of a New Jersey conservation writer, an oxymoron if ever there was one.
Naturally, I became a fervent reader of Fly Fisherman magazine, which was the only game in town back in those days. And I began to read all those articles about fly-fishing out West. Apparently there was a place called the Yellowstone region, which was to trout fishing what Hollywood was to the motion picture industry. Of course, I wanted to go there.
And so one autumn, when I had some vacation time coming to me, I flew out to Jackson Hole and fished the Snake River under the Grand Tetons, the Henrys Fork at the Railroad Ranch just over the pass in Idaho, and a few choice trout streams such as the Madison and Firehole inside Yellowstone Park. Predictably, the experience changed my life, though whether for better or worse has yet to be determined. The many advertisements in Fly Fisherman caught my eye, too. The dominant fly-fishing outfitter of that era was a New England–based company whose catalogs were prominently featured in full-page ads printed on the back cover of the magazine. And I soon got the idea from my reading that anyone who considered himself to be a serious fly fisher had better make the switch from fiberglass to this new material called graphite. Being as susceptible to advertising as the next person, I became convinced I was missing out on something.
That year, the catalog published by the New England–based fly-fishing company was promoting a rod called an “All-Rounder,” an eight-foot, three-inch graphite stick for a 7-weight line that supposedly could handle any fishing situation I might encounter in the trout playground of the Rocky Mountains. So I made the big plunge and shelled out some serious money for my first graphite fly rod. My Wyoming custom-built fiberglass artifact was consigned to the closet.
My All-Rounder was to accompany me on many trips I would take to New Jersey and Pennsylvania trout streams, as well as out West to the Yellowstone country, where I began taking my annual autumn vacations. The rod was perfectly suited to casting big hoppers and stoneflies on the Madison and Yellowstone Rivers. And lest you think a 7-weight line is too heavy for fussy spring creek work, I fooled plenty of “smart” trout with it on the meadow flats of the Henrys Fork using itsy-bitsy flies and ultrafine tippets. In fact, I never would have known I needed another rod if it hadn’t been for the printing of new fishing catalogs each season.
About this time, it was beginning to dawn on me that the New England outfit wasn’t the only fly-rod manufacturer in the world. Fly fishers I met on my Western trout-fishing vacations were using and swearing by rods built by a handful of smaller, Western-based rod companies. Their rods, it was averred, had a bit more down their trousers, so to speak, and were just the thing to handle the strong winds and the kind of big fish one was likely to encounter on brawny Western trout streams. One company in the Pacific Northwest was especially popular among fly-fishing guides that season because its research-and-development crew had been able to design a line of rods using a new grade of graphite that supposedly made them lighter, yet stiffer, thus speeding up the casting action.
And so I got it into my head that my All Rounder somehow wasn’t quite up to par. I even came to believe that in some way, my rod had let me down, notwithstanding the actual number of trout having been caught on it. The need to own a rod from an authentic Western-based company became an idée fixe. I’ll give myself credit for resisting the temptation to buy one from the company that was all the rage that year. The action of their rods was a little too quick to suit my tastes. Instead, I bought an eight-and-a-half foot stick for a 6-weight line from a rather legendary rod-building company that at the time was still located in San Francisco, and to this day, that rod remains the sweetest trout rod in my possession. Neither too fast nor too slow, it seems ideal for the kind of fly-fishing rhythm I like to slip into. It can handle big stuff such as wind-resistant hoppers and chunky stonefly nymphs, and yet it’s delicate enough for the kind of smaller, mayfly fishing that I favor.
After I slammed my car door on this rod, breaking off the tip, and it came back from a repair shop in West Yellowstone an inch shorter, I thought its lovely action would be ruined forever. But I tried it out the next evening while fishing a Brown Drake hatch on the Gibbon River, and I couldn’t detect any difference, which relieved me greatly.
I caught numerous trout with this rod over the years. Time passed, as it is prone to do, and in the summer of 1987, I decided that I would take a leave of absence from my newspaper job just to make a special f ly-fishing tour of the Rocky Mountain West. I had a solid six weeks to fish that summer, and so I traveled all over Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana, finally winding up for a full month in Yellowstone Park. I enjoyed my sabbatical so much that the following summer — now get this — I quit my job altogether. I decided that I would take an entire year off just to fly fish across the Western United States.
And so the very next summer, after having left home, I found myself once again in Yellowstone National Park. I spent the month of July and the first week of August fishing my favorite rivers inside and just outside the park. And from Yellowstone, I went on to Oregon and Washington to fish for steelhead for the first time in my life. And finally I wound up in Northern California, where I eventually resettled and where I now live.
As I take this, my favorite trout rod, out of its tube to look at it, I can’t help but think of all those rivers that I fished while using it. This rod has landed trout on at least sixty-five rivers in the Eastern and Western United States. It occurs to me, rather predictably, that I have a lifetime of memories invested in it.
Now let’s see what else the closet holds. A low-cost 5-weight graphite trout rod manufactured by the same company that mass-produces an inexpensive and ubiquitous fly reel that has been used to land more trout than any other fly reel ever made, no doubt due to the fact that more people can actually afford to own one. I myself own a half dozen of these reels. These were once manufactured in Ohio, of all places. Today, that reel is made in Japan. Their rods are a kind of sideline. I see that this particular rod from this company has a broken tip. Now how did that happen? Oh, yes, I remember now. I caught the branch of a pine tree on a back cast while fishing Crystal Creek, a tributary of Wyoming’s Gros Ventre River. I brought the rod down too hard and snapped the tip section clean in two, a brilliant maneuver. My only good memory of this rod is catching a mess of bluegills, pickerel, and a few dinky bass from a Pine Barrens lake one evening near my house in New Jersey. These fish didn’t seem to mind the fact that the rod didn’t cost very much. The rod died in Wyoming, a fitting epitaph for any fly rod.
Here’s another broken pole: my father’s 5-weight graphite trout stick. He gave it to me after he got too old to fish. I don’t know how he broke the tip. Curiously, I didn’t learn how to fly fish from my father — I actually started doing it before he did, while in my mid-twenties. My father took up fly fishing in his retirement years. He used to be a New England surf fisher during the years when striped bass were scarcer than major American novelists. That was when I was very young, and our family was living just outside of Boston.
It wasn’t only trout I sought in those days when I first took up the art of the fly rod. Although they were my first love, I also became keenly interested in saltwater fly fishing. This was well before the sport became popular on the Middle Atlantic seaboard. It hadn’t taken me long to discover that the trout fishing in New Jersey was decidedly mediocre when stacked up against Western trout streams. Anyway, New Jersey rivers were at their prime only in the springtime, during six or seven weeks from mid-April through late May. By early June, the good mayfly hatches were over, and it became too hot for any decent trout fishing. And so I turned to the ocean, bays, and tidal creeks that beckoned at my back door.
I knew that I would need a big rod to fish in the Atlantic Ocean, one much heavier and stronger than my trout rods. After all, the North Atlantic wasn’t some prissy trout stream. I figured that at a minimum, I would need a 9-weight rod.
My first saltwater fly rod cost me about eighty dollars. At that time, 1979, it was the most expensive fly rod I had ever purchased. The rod was manufactured by a good company and was made out of fiberglass. I never quite got used to this rod. I took it out to the bays and inlets near where I lived to fish for stripers and bluefish, and when the wind wasn’t blowing too strongly, onto the beaches to cast into the surf.
What I really needed was someone to teach me how to control my casting. This wasn’t trout fishing with a willow stick. I didn’t know a single soul who was into saltwater fly fishing at the time. I never saw anyone else doing it on the beach. Remember, this was many years before the sport caught on big-time on the Northeast seaboard. Saltwater fly fishing’s staggering popularity in the Northeast today is a fairly recent phenomenon. But in those days, I didn’t have anyone around to teach me the fundamentals. I had to go tarpon fishing down in the Florida Keys, where the fly-fishing scene had been mapped out for years, in order to get my first bona fide instructions from a guide on how to handle a saltwater fly rod properly. (Little did I know at the time, but the world’s first saltwater fly-fishing club, the Salt Water Fly Rodders of America, had established itself not too far from where I lived. Naturally, being a crack journalist, I was oblivious to this fact and never even knew I lived close to a community of saltwater fly fishers.)
After a season of struggling with this heavy fiberglass stick and casting loops wide enough to fly an airplane through, I succumbed and bought a suitable graphite fly rod for the ocean. In fact, I bought a miracle pole made out of a combination of boron and graphite that was being heavily promoted by the New England rod manufacturer in whose thrall I still found myself.
The rod came from the company’s “Powerflex” line, a real thunderstick capable of achieving what were at the time rather high line speeds, but would be seen as heavy and rather clunky by today’s standards. It did much to narrow my loops and put some distance into my casts, but nobody was about to mistake me for Lefty Kreh.
My best day fishing in the Atlantic Ocean with this rod occurred on a muggy evening in June when a school of bluefish attacked the beach off Corson’s Inlet. (Yes, that Corson’s Inlet, the sand spit made famous by A.R. Ammons in his great eponymous poem.) In the ensuing blitz, which started at sundown, I managed to hook fifteen big choppers. Unfortunately I landed only two of those bluefish, because I had failed to put on a wire shock tippet. I had never before experienced anything like the furious action of those hungry blues.
Stripers, I found, were much harder to come by than bluefish. That was the period when striped bass were suffering their famous decline all along the Atlantic Coast. (There has to be some cruel irony in the fact that I moved to San Francisco at a time when its once-famous striper fishery in the bay was on the fritz, only to learn that stripers on the East Coast were rebounding just in time for me to miss out on the action.)
Once I made the switch to the boron-graphite rod, I never again fished the big fiberglass number. But I’m thinking of taking it out of its poplin sack one of these days, perhaps for winter steelhead on the Russian River. It might be fun to use it again, if only for old time’s sake.
Now here’s what happened to the boron-graphite rod. When I went out to the West Coast, my saltwater rod suddenly became my steelhead rod. This rod was responsible for one of the signal events in my life, the capture of my first steelhead, on the North Umpqua River in Oregon, on the morning of August 14, 1988. Since that day, I’ve caught steelhead with this rod on Oregon’s Deschutes River, on the Kalama in Washington, and on the Russian, Gualala, Garcia, Navarro, Klamath, Trinity, and Smith Rivers in California. But the truth is, I can’t say that this rod is well suited for steelhead fishing. It just seems a bit too stiff and awkward. I had cast other graphite steelhead rods owned by friends, and I much preferred their lighter weights and smoother actions.
And so when I finally had an opportunity to take a steelhead trip I couldn’t afford up to British Columbia, I celebrated by buying a new graphite steelhead rod that I couldn’t afford either. It was a nine-and-a-half-foot 8-weight beauty, purchased from the same company that made my favorite trout rod, and I christened it on a thirteen-pound buck steelhead that I caught on a dry fly on the Morice River. I went on to take steelhead with my new rod on the Bulkley, Kispiox, Copper, and Suskwa Rivers up in BC, and I caught coho, chum, and pink salmon with it on the Lakelse River on that same trip. Since then, I have used this rod for all my steelhead and salmon fishing.
I still use my old boron-graphite thunderstick on occasion, but only in salt water, which is what it was originally designed for anyway. I have caught rockfish and cabezon with it in the ocean off Big Sur and in Monterey Bay, and sometimes I still use it to subdue stripers in San Francisco Bay and on ocean beaches near the surf town of Pacifica. Because of its power and high line speed, this boron-graphite lance is well suited for windy conditions on the bay and ocean, but there isn’t much poetry in its casts. I suppose if I buy a new fly rod in the future, it will probably be a saltwater model. So if you happen to be a fly-rod manufacturer with designs on my wallet, there’s hope for you yet.
Now let’s see what else I have owned over the years. I have fished with a bamboo fly rod. I bought it used for about two hundred bucks and sold it back to the same used-cane dealer minus a broken tip for a hundred. It was so-called “blue-collar” or “working-class” cane, mass-produced at midcentury by a rod company in Colorado. At first I wasn’t able to cast it much over thirty feet — it just wouldn’t load in my hand. Later, I found out this was my fault and not the rod’s — bamboo requires a whole different stroke. Once mastered, it became a real pleasure. I broke one of its twin tips while landing a fat rainbow on Hat Creek in the volcano country of Northern California. I wish I had it back. I keep a fishing journal, and I see from my notes that I caught my last trout over fifteen years ago. It was a twenty-inch brown, caught on a San Juan Worm in California’s East Walker River. I also caught a nineteen-inch rainbow trout that same day from the same stream. I well remember the shadows lengthening over the sagebrush valley, the sight of the Sweetwater Mountains over in Nevada, and the solid wall of Sierra peaks shining with spring snow. That East Walker brown trout was a nice final memory of the sport to take with me.
Since that day, I have spent all my outdoors time fishing not for trout, but for salmon and steelhead on California’s coastal redwood streams in the fall and winter and for summer steelhead up in Oregon. I also pursue striped bass in San Francisco Bay and in the ocean. I don’t really know when, if ever, I will return to trout fishing. Salmon and steelhead fishing is where my heart’s desire lies. I never had a chance to fish for them when I was living on the East Coast, and I’m making up for lost time.
So that’s about it from my inventory of fly rods. I’ve left out a few of the early dime-store models. In all, I’ve owned ten fly rods over my lifetime. Two are superb fishing sticks; two are perfectly OK; the rest I probably couldn’t give away at a yard sale. But these last were serviceable enough on the water and caught just as many fish as the snazzy rods.
In addition to the rods, I own a fairly expensive lightweight trout reel that seems to do everything that my old bargain-basement reels did at half its cost. For my winter steelhead fishing, I own a large and rather expensive reel that looks suspiciously like the twin brother of a cheaper model made by another company. As luck would have it, this expensive steelhead reel is just as heavy and tiring as the el cheapo model it resembles. I keep it and a spare spool rigged with a sink-tip line for winter fish. For summer steelhead, I own an old pewter-colored reel manufactured by a British tackle company that goes by the same name as a famously pessimistic English novelist. I picked it up used for a song. It’s equipped with a floating 8-weight long-belly steelhead taper that I fish with during the summer and fall when I visit the North Umpqua River. Its simple click drag sometimes leaves the reel backlashed when the spool whips around faster than a steelhead can take out line.
Recently, for my ocean fishing, I purchased a very large, durable, inexpensive fly reel with two spare spools (all for less than a hundred dollars) to replace an older model of this warhorse whose insides had rusted away due to saltwater corrosion, but only because I hadn’t taken proper care of it. It is in fact the same bargainbin model that bears such an uncanny resemblance to my expensive steelhead reel and is made by the same company that manufactures those cheap and ubiquitous Ohio fly reels that I once used for all my trout fishing. And thus, just as in T. S. Eliot’s famous poem, at the end of all my exploring I arrive where I started, only to know the place for the first time. This big saltwater reel and its two backup spools are equipped with floating, intermediate, and fast sink-tip lines that I have convinced myself I need if I am going to catch stripers. Stripers don’t make line-burning runs, so I can get away with this reel’s simple-minded drag.
I have only an adequate number of steelhead flies, which I am constantly in need of replacing. I have about two hundred trout flies, more than I suppose I’ll ever need again, with one notable exception. When I was up in British Columbia fishing for steelhead, I discovered that the “salmon flies” that I had once purchased years ago from Dan Bailey’s Fly Shop in Livingston, Montana, in order to fish the so-called “salmon fly” hatches of mating stoneflies on the Madison and Yellowstone rivers (and which cost me only a fraction of what steelhead flies cost these days), proved to be exceptionally effective as dry flies for British Columbia steelhead, and now I’m all out of them.
You know the old question fly fishers ask each other as a kind of game: If you could fish with only a half dozen flies, what would they be? Well, I’ve caught fully 99 percent of all my trout on five basic fly patterns in different sizes: a Gold Ribbed Hare’s Ear, Elk Hair Caddis, Pale Morning Dun, Blue-Winged Olive, and Joe’s Hopper.
I own two inexpensive fishing vests. One I keep crammed with the big reels and steelhead flies and other junk that I need for that sport. It’s hanging up in the closet, ready to go at a moment’s notice. I just grab it off the hook, and I’m out the door with everything I need. The same is true for my second vest, which is filled with reels and flies I need for trout fishing, but which hasn’t been out of the closet for fifteen years. I don’t use or need a vest for my saltwater fishing.
I’m not even going to get into all the waders I’ve owned over the years, the ones that have leaked and come apart, it always seems, after the first season of wear. I don’t know what can be done about this problem. Leaky waders are fly-fishing’s curse on the House of Atreus. I always buy the cheapest stuff I can get away with and regret it later. Right now, I own a pair of eighty-dollar neoprene waders for my winter fishing, which I had to repair after the first season when the seam sprung a leak at the crotch. and a pair of summer lightweights from the same company that haven’t started leaking yet, but it’s only a matter of time.
Well, I hardly think that this amounts to an impressive pile of loot. My spending habits would probably send a tackle dealer running to his therapist or bartender. Looking over my inventory, I can’t imagine another fly fisher envying me for my gear. But I think they might envy me for the rivers I’ve fished and the amount of time I’ve spent on the water.
I suppose when you look at it, over an adult lifetime of rather serious fishing, I have probably spent less on equipment than any other earnest fly fisher I know. And yet I once quit a job to travel out West and fish for an entire year. I relocated to the West Coast mainly for its steelhead fishing. And I have even devoted a few years of my life to writing books about my fishing experiences that so far haven’t made me any money and aren’t likely to. So I guess you can say that I have paid the price in more ways than one.
“My Inventory” originally appeared in the Autumn 2012 issue of The Drake. The author wishes readers to know that since then, he has returned to trout fishing, and he’s also pleased to report that he recently plucked a striper from the Atlantic surf usingthat old 9-weight fiberglass rod.