There’s a certain kind of day on a certain kind of water when all I try to do is catch a fish.
I know it sounds goofy. What am I trying to do the other days? But most anglers know what I’m talking about, a technique or style of fishing they turn to — often reluctantly — when all they care about is bringing a fish to hand.
Suddenly the fantasies and farfetched schemes no longer matter. You’re not a character in a story. I’m reminded of how, way back when, I used to claim if I were in Baja with a family to feed, I could get the job done with my 9-foot jigging rod, a Penn Jigmaster filled with 20-pound-test Maxima, and a handful of chrome Krocodiles and rubber Scampis.
But at that point in my angling career, I no longer wanted to fish that way. Instead, I wanted to hurl a heavy shooting head out beyond the surf line, eager to discover what a concoction of colorful fur and feathers lashed to a big fly hook could deceive.
I’m still a fool for the fabulous. It’s not the two-foot wild rainbows that hold me a second week this summer in a tent and 100-degree heat, but rather the chance, at dusk, to raise one more of these beasts to a size 8 dry fly.
And I refuse, on all counts, to calculate the hours I’ve wasted watching the wake of a sparsely dressed Muddler wrinkling the glossy stream, hoping once more for a steelhead to enliven this feckless dream.
It’s hard to say what brings me down from the clouds. Sometimes it’s a friend catching fish while, casting about, I feel like a lost cause sitting in right field watching the butterflies. Or there’s a woman involved. Or it occurs to me that time is finite: before the story unfolds, who’s to say I don’t up and die?
Usually, however, it’s a matter of simple curiosity:
Are there fish here? What kind?
What do they look like? How big?
Given I’ve a fly rod in hand, the surest way I know to answer these questions is with a couple of nymphs — sometimes weighted, sometimes not — and the technique called tight-line nymphing. This isn’t anything new. For most accomplished fly fishers, in fact, this kind of nymphing is second nature: sink the flies, come up tight by lifting line off the water, lead the cast through the lie without actually pulling the flies out of their natural, drag-free drift. Of course, sometimes there’s split shot involved. The aim is to stay connected to your flies. If a fish eats, or if you touch rock or bottom, you know immediately — while at the same instant, the tip of the rod has already begun to rise.
It’s as subtle as bait fishing. And just as effective. Yet for many fly fishers, this type of presentation remains mysterious. Or worse, held in disdain or disregard. They believe the dry fly — the most elegant aspect of the sport — is also the most challenging way to catch fish.
When actually, dry-fly fishing is much, much easier than effective nymphing.
To recognize a practiced nympher, all you have to do is watch how long it takes the angler to notice a bottom-stalled or hung-up fly. The novice or inexperienced nympher won’t be aware the fly has stopped moving until current draws the leader tight — often long after the fly stopped fishing. The experienced hand, however, lifts immediately, just as he or she would were it a fish that intercepted the drifting fly.
All of which comes to mind recently as I scramble at first light down a steep embankment crowded with oaks above the mouth of a tributary still frequented, on occasion, by sea-run fish. It’s also rumored that along with these anadromous species, resident trout have shown up in the final mile-long stretch, now that obstacles to in-stream migrations have been removed. I really don’t know what I’m fishing for, although anytime anyone mentions steelhead, I’m hard-pressed to ignore even the most remote possibility.
Faced with no clear objective, I carry a 10-foot 6-weight, a rod I found years ago on the bottom of the Poudre River in Colorado while peddling books through the West. The rod isn’t quite right for any of the fishing I do. By that I mean I nearly always have a different rod I choose when I know what I’m fishing for. But with a little more length and a little more backbone than normal, this is a rod I can fish practically anywhere and feel like I’m in the game, whether it turns out I need to deliver a dry fly at 50 feet or muscle up on a fish I would have rather dealt with on a Spey rod.
And it’s a terrific nymphing tool. One problem with a longer single-handed rod is the extra effort it takes to wave it through the air. If you’re just plopping nymphs upstream, the added length hardly matters. And once the cast is made and it’s time to lift line off the water and come into contact with your fly or flies, then begin to fish the cast as if trying to paint a floor with a brush dangling from a string, that extra foot of rod gives you that much more control while probing the depths of a moving stream.
Even if you fish with a bobber, you want to establish and maintain contact with your float, which usually means keeping as much line off the water as possible.
I reach the river with the help of a rope someone has tied to the trunk of an oak and left dangling down the trail. The river has cut a deep slot tight to the base of the bank; a wading staff and a cinched belt above my belly get me to the start of a broad tailout, formed by the freestone outwash tumbling down from of the canyon now that the upstream dam has been removed. The river here is a hundred yards wide. It braids its way through channels and shallow riffles as if water from a hose running across sand, the patterns and contours of hydrodynamics as easy to read as a grade-school primer.
Cool air hovers above the chill currents. Against the far bank, I find another deep slot, this one as perfectly proportioned as a meadow stream. Well, let’s just see what we have here, I think, standing ankle deep in a spill of water tumbling over a lip of loose stones. And because of the hints and rumors and my feel for these things, I add a length of tippet to the bend of the hook of an October Caddis pupa and to that I tie on a little red nymph that I learned about from the best fly fisher I’ve ever known.
I’ve mentioned this before: Bruce Milhiser doesn’t think much of steelhead. “They’re dumb,” he says. “Put a fly in front them, they’ll eat it.”
Of course, finding steelhead to put a fly in front of is another matter altogether. Bruce considers his nymph a last resort. (He also ties it in black, purple, and probably other colors he hasn’t shown me.) Like many traditional steelheaders, he prefers his f lies served up swung. If there’s irony whatsoever in this streamy fly tale, it’s that I’ll tie on Bruce’s little red nymph not as a final option, but as a first choice when I just want to catch something. It’s a good fly for that. Obviously, there’s something eggy about the pattern, a crucial aspect in any attempt to insert deceit into the food chain of a drainage with sea-run fish. What are fish doing, anyway, down in the final reach of a freestone wash spilling out of a deep, forested canyon?
Bruce’s little red nymph can help answer that question — plus the others you might have when you feel the point really is to catch a fish. A couple of drifts down the far-bank slot and my plucky nymph fools a slender, square-headed steelhead, all of 22 inches, a wild fish aimed who knows where. Just below this, I hook and land a chunky 14-inch trout. Then another 10 steps downstream, where the current slows, a standard-issue whitefish resigns itself to the tug of my line, the red nymph pinned to its lip as though the glowing ember of a cigarette in a 1950s Hollywood movie.
For a start, at least, that tells me all I need to know.
Materials
Hook: TMC 2457, size 6
Bead: 3/16-inch gold Cyclops Bead Eye
Thread: Red Danville 140-denier Waxed Flymaster
Weight: .025-inch lead wire
Tail: Red rabbit fur from Zonker strip
Shellback: Small Lagartun flat gold tinsel
Ribbing: Small copper wire
Abdomen: Red Uni-Mohair
Thorax: Seal fur dyed red, or substitute red Angora goat
Tying Instructions
Step 1: Slide the bead over the point of the hook and up tight to the eye. Secure the hook in the vise with the eye tipped down. Wrap 10 turns of lead directly behind the bead. Slide the lead wraps tight against the bead. Start the thread directly behind the lead. Build a dam of thread wraps to hold the wraps of lead in place. Advance the thread over the lead and up to the bead, then return the thread to the built-up dam. Continue to wrap the thread behind the lead, creating an even taper between the lead and the shank of the hook.
Step 2: Wind the thread deep into the bend of the hook. Adjust the hook as necessary so that you can secure the tail almost perpendicular to the eye of the hook. Clip a tuft of hair from a Zonker strip. Tie in a tail no more than the length of the hook shank behind the bead. Cut the excess tail material at an angle and continue to use thread wraps to create a fair taper throughout the length of the hook.
Step 3: For the rib and the shellback, first secure a length of copper wire forward of the root of the tail, then a length of small gold tinsel. With the thread still near the root of the tail, secure a length of Uni-Mohair. Advance the thread to the lead wraps. Create the abdomen with wraps of Mohair, again trying to create an even taper throughout. Leaving yourself plenty of room for the thorax, secure the forward turns of Mohair and clip the excess.
Step 4: Pull the gold tinsel over the back of the tapered abdomen. Secure and clip the excess. Now make five or six evenly spaced wraps of copper wire around the abdomen, keeping the tinsel shellback straight along back of the fly. Secure the copper wire forward the abdomen and clip the excess.
Step 5: Create a dubbing loop. Wax the legs of the loop. If you like seal dubbing as much as I do, you can get it through John McLain at FeathersMc. com. (The story is that somebody got hold of old Russian army coats lined in seal fur and harvested and dyed the stuff.) Angora goat is a fair substitute. Spread the fibers along the legs of the dubbing loop, then spin your dubbing tool to create a spiky rope. Wind the rope forward to create a plump, hairy thorax that pushes up tight against the bead. Secure with the thread. To tie off behind a bead, I always wax my thread and whip finish, which helps the thread slide through the hitches. A drop or two of lacquer behind the bead is useful if you can avoid contacting the thorax dubbing.
