Picture yourself on a stream in the Sierra as spring begins to arrive. It’s been a long winter, so you’re itching to wet a line, but the weather’s awful, still wintry, and the water’s almost icy to the touch. It’s off-color, too, with enough snowmelt to affect visibility. A strong northwest wind howls through the mountains and makes casting difficult. Nothing’s hatching, of course, and probably never will today, given your luck. After a few desultory passes with a nymph, it’s not surprising that you decide to call it quits and head to the nearest café for a burger and a beer.
But not so fast. What if you hang in there and give it a last shot, as I once did on the North Yuba? The conditions were as described above. It was late April, with leaden skies, a threat of snow, high and roily water, and not a bug on the wing. I don’t know what prompted me to stick around. Usually, I’m a sucker for a burger and a beer if the weather’s foul, but I resisted temptation this time, dipped into my fly box, and chose from among the half dozen or so streamers I carried in those days a size 6 Woolly Bugger, my favorite streamer pattern and possibly the best all-arounder for California rivers.
I learned a lot that afternoon. It was so cold I couldn’t stay long at any pool for fear of developing chilblains. I’m exaggerating a bit, but the near-freezing temperature did keep me moving, and that’s essential when the water’s high and the trout aren’t biting. You’re hunting and hoping, trying to put your streamer in front of one of the bruisers down deep who’ ll be hungry enough or annoyed enough to attack it. And “deep” is the operative word. I was fishing a floating line, so I added a couple of split shot to sink the Woolly Bugger into the calm below the surface turbulence. In the next hour, I hooked two hefty browns.
That encouraged me. I began to regard myself as a fly-fishing genius, the only angler clever enough to outsmart the conditions. But I caught exactly nothing else that afternoon, not even a six-inch planter. The cold I’d ignored during my brief genius phase left my fingers nearly frozen solid, and it took a pot of coffee and a belt of bourbon to de-ice me. I realized my success was really due to diligence, hunting and hoping and trusting to chance. Sometimes that’s all you can do when the river gods withhold their blessing, and a streamer is a good way to go. I carry many more streamers now, enough to fill a small fly box, and rely on them in all sorts of situations, particularly as attractors when the fishing’s slow. They’re excellent for teasing out the trout lurking beneath undercut banks or behind a fallen branch or limb. It’s true that they’re often mistaken for baitfish, but I believe that the reason why a fair number of big browns and rainbows strike a streamer isn’t because they’re hungry. They’re just mean-spirited and angry at the world. When I see the vengeful look in their eye as I release one, I’m certain they’d chase me down and punish me if they had four legs. Although I’m still fond of my Woolly Buggers, I also pack a variety of leech, sculpin, and shiner imitations to use as the circumstances demand.
Streamers are a late addition to our fly boxes. They didn’t exist until the 1880s, when anglers in Maine began to develop them. Legend has it that Harvey Donaldson, a firearms expert, and his pal Leonard F. Fish — I’m not making this up — created the prototype while camping at a lake. Their camp cook was cleaning some chickens, so they gathered up a few feathers and tied four of them on each side of a bare hook. “That really worked!” Donaldson exclaimed in a letter to a friend, although that was true only in fast water, where the fish just caught a glimpse. Around the same time, the guide Alonzo Stickney Bacon — I’m not making that up, either — devised a similar fly with hen’s feathers, and the landlocked salmon he was after “took them with avidity.”
The first to improve on these crude versions was Carrie Gertrude Stevens of the Rangeley Lakes region. She’d always been a bait angler, but after seeing an early example of a streamer tied in the English style, she began tying her own. In 1924, while fishing a smelt imitation with gray feathers at the Upper Dam Pool of the lakes, she hooked a brook trout of 243/4 inches that weighed 6 pounds and 13 ounces. That won her second prize in the annual Field & Stream fishing contest. She provided a stirring account of her hourlong battle to land her trophy, and the editor was so impressed he ran it as a feature.
Readers loved the story and wrote to Stevens offering to buy a few of her smelt imitations. That convinced her to go commercial and start a business. The imitation evolved into the famous Gray Ghost, still an effective fly for both trout and salmon. Carrie Stevens was an idiosyncratic tyer. She never used a vise, preferring Half Hitches, and devised so many new streamer patterns that she worried they’d be stolen without credit or any payment. Not until 1953, when her health started to fail, did she let anyone see her tying. She passed on her client list to a friend, Wendell Folkins, and taught him the tricks of her trade.
Another friend of hers was Joseph Bates, the acknowledged dean of streamer f ishing in the United States, whose comprehensive book Streamers and Bucktails, published in 1979, is still a standard reference work. Educated at MIT, Bates served as a heavily decorated soldier on General Douglas MacArthur’s staff during World War II, then took a job with his father’s advertising firm helping to publicize the spinning tackle new to the American market. But he soon turned to his first love, fly fishing, and became a great collector of streamers, specializing in vintage Atlantic salmon flies. If you’ve got any vintage flies in the attic or garage, hang onto them. The Bates family sold six hundred of Joe’s at auction in 1990 and earned $52,542, or roughly $121,000 today.
The current guru of the streamer world is Kelly Galloup. He owns the Slide Inn on the Madison River in Montana, where he ties his flies, runs a guide service, and has cabins for rent. I first came across Galloup when I ordered his Peanut Envy online, a streamer with a cone head that has a very effective diving motion for reaching those bottom dwellers. As influential as Galloup is as a designer, he’s even better as a promoter. He’s known for the clever puns he uses to name his f lies — the Ant Acid, for instance, or the Stacked Blonde — although he seems to be tiring of the game and recently joked that he might start calling his flies Jim or Bill.
Galloup favors natural materials and shies away from synthetics. He includes a few articulated streamers in his product line, but I’ve never had much success with those, finding them too awkward to cast. Galloup’s big on the video scene at YouTube and elsewhere, and I picked up a few tips by watching him, although none that I’d call earth-shattering. He’s quite specific about how to retrieve a streamer, for instance. He suggests short strips of four to eight inches with an occasional wiggle to impart a little more life. If you feel a strike, don’t react too quickly. Let the fish hook itself with a good grab, Galloup advises, or you’ll wind up empty-handed.
As a guide, he’s a little eccentric. When he was gathering the material for his breakthrough book, Modern Streamers for Trophy Trout (1999), he insisted his clients fish only streamers. He also warned them there’d be a fifteen-minute break after lunch so he could take a nap and recharge his batteries. He’s been taking those naps all his angling life. He doesn’t think much of the clients who come on like experts and pretend to know the ropes. He won’t cater to those folks. A guide’s job, he says, is to turn the average angler into a great one, and that gives rise to an obvious question, “Where to I sign up?”