Is it too early to begin thinking about steelhead? My buddy Jeff Cottrell doesn’t think so, but that’s probably because he’s reached the point in his career where steelhead have become a year-round game. Or curse. In all things angling, nothing seems surer to deprive an angler of any claims to mastery, much less a sense of peace, than a calendar dedicated to finding steelhead, month after month, anywhere in their native range. It’s an aim sufficiently difficult — or onerous — that I would worry about Jeff, were he not possessed of a certain pragmatic optimism, the fatalist’s hope that all steelheaders must embrace if they want to stay in the hunt for the long haul.
The roosterfish fancier can grow desperate when, day after day, his casts are rejected by fish lashing the surface in reckless attack on anything but his flies. Yet at least he keeps seeing fish — feeding fish, no less — which generally makes the thing seem doable, even when you can’t get it right. And if his spirit fails completely, the roosterfisher can always tell his pangero to go find some skipjack tuna, mindless sport into which he can plunge his steaming frustrations.
But a steelheader knows few such mercies. The fishless day means — what? Far too much claptrap has been freighted onto the sport, yet nobody has a deeper sense of staring into a meaningless void than a steelheader in the midst of a protracted skunk. Are there fish here? Has one even seen my fly? Does my next cast matter?
Few anglers endure many of these spells without suffering lasting damage. Some steelheaders simply quit: Why go fishing if you’re not going to catch any fish? Others find it easier to keep plugging away, albeit in reduced doses, rather than accept a life in which they’ll never hook a steelhead again. And then there are steelheaders like Jeff, who, in the face of empty casts and fishless runs, ends up spending more time on steelhead rivers each year because, to his way of thinking, you still never know what epic fish might suddenly come your way.
Good steelheaders are often possessed of this sort of loony buoyancy. Jeff and his wife, Jan, found a little house a cast away from a favorite Northwest steelhead river shortly after his fly shop went belly up for all the usual reasons. Not even Jeff’s silver goatee and feel-good charm could cover the lease. The river opens in June, but for much of the summer, things are spotty as runoff from snowmelt and mountain glaciers stains the river, turning it the color of dusty yucca leaves. Jeff, like other locals, fishes the river in the summer; some even claim there’s a daily cycle that sees a period of increased water clarity from colder nighttime temperatures in the high country. But it’s not until around, say, the first of September that the river clears and fishing really lights up — at which point Jeff is in the thick of an annual gig as camp host at a steelhead lodge half an hour upriver from his flower-lined house.
I should also mention that earlier each summer, Jeff spends weeks at a time working at another lodge, a spot that anadromous fish no longer reach because of downstream dams, but where the trout are often just as big as steelhead, and on a stretch of river as big as any steelhead water in the world.
Jeff’s home river closes at the end of November. That’s just about the time the coast begins to see its first spate of heavy rains. Winter steelhead soon follow. And for the last two or three winters — I can’t quite keep track — Jeff’s had another camp-host gig, this one on a stretch of reservation water never before opened to nonnative sport anglers, the final miles of a brawling rain-forest fishery where 20-pound fish, covered in sea lice, don’t take anyone by surprise.
Which is not to say they’re taken for granted. A 20-pound steelhead is, after all, a hell of a fish, especially when hooked so close to the Pacific you can smell salt clinging to the old-growth forest looming at river’s edge. Also, because they’re steelhead — even steelhead taken from essentially private water at the tail end of a 200-square-mile drainage protected from the headwaters to the sea — they’re never easy to find, never found in abundance, and rarely a week passes when the river doesn’t blow out, unable to handle what adds up, each winter, to something on the order of 20 feet of rain.
It’s not, anyway, a cakewalk. Then again, I don’t believe steelheading ever is. Even Jeff, in all his tireless optimism, comes up against it now and then. What do you say to a group of high-dollar clients, all of them soured on big trees and rain, who have gone an entire week without so much as a touch, a take, a grab? The real guys, he says, can deal with it; experience has taught them that sea-run fisheries are always a roll of the dice. But there’s a whole new breed of fly fisher, Jeff claims, convinced that if they spend enough money and they find the remote word-of-mouth lodge, they should be guaranteed fish wherever and whenever they arrive.
“They think it should be Alaska,” says Jeff. A big man, broad-shouldered and fair, one who has spent his entire adult life dealing with guides, lodge owners, sales reps, the sporting parvenu, and clients from the privileged class, Jeff holds his ground by balancing his good nature with a faint, but very real hint of ferocity should anyone ever get too far out of hand. “I don’t tell them that if they were hoping for Alaska, that’s where they should have gone,” he says.
Good advice. More to the point, if you really don’t like what it takes to catch steelhead, you probably shouldn’t set much store in getting one now and then.
Serious steelheading — year-round or otherwise — seems always to lead back to these obvious truths. What’s even more telling is that this so-called wisdom was probably passed along to most of us early in our steelhead careers, only we just didn’t believe it. You catch fish on the fly you fish with. Your fly doesn’t matter. You don’t catch fish unless your fly’s in the water. Atlantic salmon fishing and, in recent decades, the quest for sea-run browns, can also inspire a tenor of this self-evident, if slightly paradoxical repartee. From another lifetime, Jeff remembers the advice he got from Tom Brady, the first guide to hang out his shingle in Tierra del Fuego, where Jeff had just arrived to cater to angling luminaries on the Rio Grande. “The longer you do it,” said Brady, referring to flies cast for the river’s anadromous browns, “the less you know.”
Still, steelheading gets much of the blame for these grainy observations, which smack of a kind of Oriental or Zenlike truth. You can see how it happens. Steelheading isn’t hard so much as it is a discipline or ritualized practice. You learn to do it correctly — read the water, recognize holding lies, deliver the fly — and then you’re required to do it over and over again, often with little or no feedback that suggests in any way you’re doing it right.
Sort of like life, which I won’t say any more about other than to mention that many of us remain confused, believing that we’re somehow meant to be rewarded for our good deeds, responsible citizenry, and a reasonably clear conscience.
What steelheading makes obvious, anyway, is that each of our many admirable skills may, on any given day, add up to squat, at least in terms of recognizable action with the fish we so desire. This desiring, some would argue, is part of the problem, although if that’s the secret — fishing without desire — I think we’re all pretty much hosed.
The Aqua Buddha comes out of a collection of flies that Jeff, along with Trey Combs, Jack Mitchell, and Michael Davidchik, designed for Rainy’s Flies, a series they call the Steelhead Underground. The name, I suspect, is an appeal to the latest generation of steelheaders, who want to see themselves as gnarly, radical, hardcore, dirtbag, or whatever other current adjective captures an attitude it often takes to catch steelhead with any regularity. Oddly enough, few serious steelheaders I know have ever bought their flies, much less settled for patterns tied commercially overseas.
Which isn’t to discount this particular lineup. I’m sure all of these patterns will catch fish. The trick is deciding which fly to choose — which one to hang your faith on, when.
Like many of the patterns in the Steelhead Underground collection, the Aqua Buddha offers the impression of a simplified Intruder, that beast of a fly so popular with Spey rodders on steelhead rivers today. With their undulant tendrils and seductive color combinations, these flies go a long way in approaching the size and action that gear anglers get with their wobbly plugs. The Intruder, of course, came in the wake of any number of patterns that employed trailing “stinger” hooks, a way to create a big-profile fly without resorting to a full-length hook better suited to fishing for sturgeon or triple-digit halibut. Whether tied on tubes or on hookless shanks, most stingered flies are also tied “in the round,” offering the distinct impression of a curve-handled parasol, a concession to the uncertain orientation such flies will take as they swim on a tight line without the keel-like properties of a traditional hook.
Does it matter? Tyers who like to think their stingered flies have a top and a bottom or who care about the orientation of the trailing stinger hook in relation to the rest of the fly will now use dumbbell eyes on the underside of the fly’s head, hoping to keep the fly from flopping over on its side as it swings in the current. But this is a long, long way from the notion that in steelheading, at least, your fly is but a small piece of the puzzle, and I have to confess that at some point, talk of this sort sounds to me like discussions of where to part your hair or whether the Scotch is too peaty or has too much smoke and leather in the nose.
Jeff’s a little like that, too. Yet when faced with the mysteries of steelheading across the long reach of a year, he can fall prey to the usual prejudices and jingoism that afflict anglers trying to make sense of their seemingly senseless successes and failures. More power to him; it’s a tough game. At the same time, Jeff’s under no illusions about his black-and-blue Aqua Buddha, or about any other fly that’s ever been created for steelhead. When it all begins to seem a bit too complicated, he’s fond of quoting his old mentor, Tom Brady, along the banks of the Río Grande long ago: “If something pulls, pull back.”
That’s about all any of us really knows.
Materials
Hook: 25-millimeter Waddington shank with Owner size 4 bait hook looped onto Senyo’s standard Intruder Trailer Hook Wire, black
Thread: Black 6/0 Danville
Eyes: Mini lead eyes, 1/80 ounce
Tail: Kingfisher blue Finn raccoon Zonker strips
Butt: Kingfisher blue SLF dubbing, or steelie blue Ice Dub
Underwing: Ostrich plume, mix of black and dyed kingfisher blue
Lateral Line: Herring back Krystal Flash
Overwing: Black marabou
Topping: Kingfisher blue Lady Amherst pheasant tail fibers
Collar: Guinea fowl, dyed blue
Head: Black seal dubbing
A Note on Tying the Aqua Buddha
There are countless ways of constructing flies with trailer or stinger hooks, some of them involving sophisticated tools that really do make the job easier. At the same time, it takes but a little foresight and innovation to get by with existing tools. In the accompanying photographs, it’s difficult to see that I swung the head of the fly in the port direction, then pivoted the upright shaft of the vise so that the fly was positioned appropriately. Experiment. Adapt. Both skills remain at the heart of the game.
How to Tie the Aqua Buddha
Step 1: Secure the Waddington shank with the straight eye in the vise jaws and the cocked eye at the front of the fly, pointing down. Start your thread. Lace your trailer hook onto a four-inch length of trailer hook wire. Lash the wire to the top of the Waddington shank with the point of the trailer hook positioned downward. Then feed the wire through the forward eye, fold it back below the shank, and continue lashing. Clip off the excess wire and cover the shank and lashing with wraps of thread.
Step 2: Secure the lead eyes just behind the forward eye of the fly.
Step 3: Starting at the middle of the Waddington shank, create the tail out of two tufts of Finn raccoon Zonker fibers that extend just past the back of the trailer hook.
Step 4: Create a dubbing loop and spin in the blue butt material. Wind the twisted strand of dubbing into a plump, round ball just forward of the root of the tail.
Step 5: In front of the dubbing ball, tie in half a dozen black ostrich plume fibers spaced around the top half of the shank. Do the same along the bottom half. Then repeat with fibers from a blue ostrich plume.
Step 6: For the lateral line, tie in a single strand of Krystal Flash along both sides of the fly.
Step 7: For the overwing, secure the tip of a single marabou feather. Holding the butt of the stem, make two complete turns around the hook shank. Tie off and clip the excess. Stroke the plumes toward the rear of the fly and help them lie properly with judicious wraps of thread.
Step 8: Forward of the butts of the marabou, secure a dozen Lady Amherst tail feather fibers spaced evenly around the fly. Because of the unruly marabou, it’s often easier to tie in small clumps of the Lady Amherst tail feather fibers top and bottom, rather than try to spin one big clump around the entire fly.
Step 9: For the collar, strip one side of a dyed guinea fowl feather. Tie in the feather by the tip. Make two turns of the feather, positioning it so that the fibers lie tight to the fly, rather than splaying like the bristles of a bottle brush.
Step 10: Create a small dubbing loop and spin in a bit of seal dubbing. Wind the dubbing strand forward and make a single figure eight around the eyes. Secure the dubbing strand in front of the eyes, clip the excess, and whip finish. Saturate your finish wraps with lacquer.
