Just to put this in perspective, I should mention, right here at the start, that Ed Simpson is the only guy I know who has been fly fishing in the Baja and Southern California surf longer than I have. There are others, sure — but our paths haven’t crossed. Or if they have, I wasn’t aware of it, probably because back then, it was some old fart, just like me now, who you can’t imagine as a young buck up to his waist in the shore break, double-hauling against the heavy bend of a thick-butted fiberglass rod.
I first met Ed while still throwing chrome lures with jigging rods with my buddy Peter Syka at Black’s Beach in La Jolla. Two things immediately impressed us about Ed. One, like Peter and me, he was that rare surf angler who was using artificial lures at a time when the sport was, by definition, a static waiting game played with pyramid sinkers or sand-filled tobacco sacks, a bucket of sand crabs or mussels, and maybe even a sand spike. Ed had a lightweight spinning rod matched to a classic Mitchell 300 reel, and with a little lead-headed rubber jig, he was working the edges of the deep hole that often formed in the spring those years, following the big winter swells out of the north. Peter and I were far enough into the juju of artificials in the surf — and the sometimes miraculous sport these fresh techniques could conjure — that we could tell Ed was the real deal. And when Ed looked down the beach and saw us firing our Kastmasters and chrome Krocodiles far beyond the surf line with our light-tipped jigging rods and conventional-wind reels, he had to have noticed, on occasion, the sparks jumping from the tips of our rods, too.
He called us The Iron Men.
The other thing about Ed that impressed us was that he had a key to the gate at Black’s — in our eyes, an all but royal privilege that allowed him to drive his VW bug down the private road and park in the little lot right above the beach.
Only later did I discover that Ed was a refugee from the same sort of humble interior suburbia from which Peter and I had escaped. Hometown? San Bernardino. As a husband and new father, I ran into Ed again at a nursery he turned out to own between Cardiff and Encinitas, a place that specialized in aquatic plants. I had a little brick-lined patio pond at my house in Oceanside. Since I’d last seen him fishing, Ed had become something of a local pond guru, while at the same time raising some of the loveliest water lilies found anywhere in San Diego County.
We hit it off. A sun-bright welterweight, Ed seemed possessed of some sort of manic zeal that made him as enthusiastic about healthy ponds and aquatic habitat as he was about fish and fishing — and utterly distractible from one moment to the next. A spring visit to the Santa Fe Nursery to pick up a few oxygenating grasses would turn into an all-morning affair as Ed, talking to three customers at once, scampered from one pond to the next, stuffing plastic garbage sacks with dripping plant material. Then there were fish I needed, and snails, and Ed would remember something he wanted to show me in the drafty A-frame, half greenhouse, half loft, that he shared with his wife and daughter, and off we would go to look for an essay or photo in an old gardening or fishing book or a snapshot from a recent trip to trout country a thousand miles away.
Or remnants of Baja travels. Ed knew the turf, some of the same sacred tracts that I haunted, and to equally alarming effect. For years, Ed and his wife traveled in the inner circle of the intrepid Baja field biologist Dennis Bostic, who dropped dead at 38 after walking away from a Jeep that he had just finished piling up into a tree. Around the same time, Ed got his first saltwater fish on a fly, a San Ignacio Lagoon corvina caught on a popper. Tragedy we understand, but nobody comes away from his first saltwater surface strike unchanged — more so, perhaps, back when only a handful of anglers had ever called up such spirits before. It was Ed’s stories, I should add, that inspired my first trip to San Ignacio. Ed gave me directions and a sophisticated boat compass to pass along to Francisco Mayoral, the official gatekeeper when the lagoon was designated a reserve to limit tourist access to this important nursery for breeding and nursing gray whales. Was it illegal to fish in the lagoon? Francisco took one look at Ed’s gift and said go right ahead.
Ed was also the first person to mention to me that I might be interested in reading something by a writer named John Gierach. We kept in touch. To this day, Ed has never embraced the use of computers, and I welcome his handwritten notes and postcards, with misspelled and crossed-out words and often a handful of processed photos printed from honest-to-god film. For years, Ed and his wife owned a plot of land in central Oregon, so it seemed somehow fitting that I should guide him to his first steelhead, back when a dozen such fish made for a good week, rather than a whole season. Ed also had inside dope on some of the classiest trout water in the West: a buddy still rents the house next to the Nature Conservancy at Silver Creek, and before dying, old John from Encinitas used to take Ed each fall to the reservation section of one of the best stretches of brown-trout water in all of Wyoming.
While this and of course much more was happening, Ed and his wife were also slipping off to a reach of tidewater south of the border, a place Ed has asked me to “whitewash” if I ever mention it in writing, so that readers don’t show up and crowd him out on the tongue of the next flood. All I can say is that Ed’s found himself a spot that’s a textbook replica of everything enchanting about Southern California inshore fly fishing. As far as he’s concerned, there’s no place else he’d rather call home.
After 35 years, Ed has a right to lay at least partial claim to his little slice of paradise. Over time, he’s built a beachside cabaña, complete with kitchen cabinets fashioned from redwood salvaged out of an Encinitas greenhouse torn down to make way for North County gentrification. He fishes out of a 14-foot Gregor aluminum skiff with a 25-horse Johnson. The tide goes in, and the tide goes out, and Ed gets his share of bass, corbinas, halibut, and a host of more exotic species that show up during El Niño years, all the while fishing almost exclusively with the simplest of flies, tied to replicate the little rubber jig that Peter and I saw him fishing with all those decades ago below the end of the road at Black’s.
There’s something refreshing about a fly tied to imitate nothing so much as a similar deception from another genre of the angling arts. Here we begin to approach the deepest roots of the sport, a form of alchemy we would be wise to regard when trying to design our next so-called lifelike imitation of, say, the anadromous phase of the California killifish, Fundulus parvipinnis.
What makes a fish strike? Why does it eat this fly and not another? Ed has pushed the limits of simplicity with his stripped-down grub — a rabbit-fur replica of the famous rubbery Kalin’s Grub — but is there anything about it that suggests it needs any other element than what’s already there?
Ed doesn’t think so. What you have, in fact, is a remarkably bold fly, a single confident brush stroke that announces its unambiguous guile without retreat into hedged bets or affectation. Ed’s Grub is as subtle as a nightstick. It makes a Clouser Minnow look as if it were created by Winslow Homer.
If it were a poem, it would be William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow.”
Which is why we won’t find Ed’s Grub this year in anybody’s catalogue or on a list of “Must-Have Flies for Inshore Lunkers!” The concept’s too simple. I could’ve thought of that. It’s the sort of fly that actually irritates a certain school of fly angler — those who think there’s something low or unsporting in a pattern without pretense of imitating any form of life found in the natural world.
Forty years ago, Ed didn’t know any better. He just wanted to catch fish in the ocean on flies. He’d fished the rubber Kalin’s Grub for ages; he fashioned a fly that looked like one. Until I started this essay, the fly never even had a name.
Materials
Hook: Mustad 34007 or similar, size 2
Thread: White Danville 3/0 waxed mono cord or similar
Eyes: Small or medium (1/40 or 1/30 ounce) dumbbell eyes
Body: White rabbit fur strip
How to Tie Ed’s Grub
Step 1: Secure the hook in the vise and start the thread about one-quarter to one-third of the way back from the hook eye. Create a small lump of thread aft of where you will secure the eyes.
Step 2: We’ve covered techniques for securing dumbbell eyes in previous columns. There are a few things to remember. First, position the wrist of the dumbbell tight to the forward edge of the lump of thread. Then take five or six wraps in one direction, aft to forward, across the dumbbell wrist, then five or six, forward to aft, in the opposite direction. Square the eyes to the hook shank, if necessary. Repeat the cross-wrist wraps. Now — and here’s the most important step — bring your thread above the hook shank and begin winding the thread around the existing thread wraps, keeping your thread parallel to and above the hook shank, much as if your were tying the base of a wing post for a parachute fly. These wraps around the thread wraps and between the dumbbell eyes and the hook shank lash and tighten the forward-and-aft wraps, creating a grip you can’t get no matter how many figure-eights you might use around both the shank and the dumbbell wrist. At this point, I also saturate the thread wraps with the same lacquer I use for head cement. (Since the point of Ed’s Grub is the efficacy of simplicity, I might as well add that I refill my head cement jar from the same gallon of high gloss industrial lacquer that I bought at least 15 years ago. When the viscosity of the stuff in the jar changes the least bit, I dump it and, using a plastic syringe, draw out another jarful from the gallon can, where, after all this time, the lacquer remains as clear as scotch and as runny as warm maple syrup.)
Step 3: Cut a strip of rabbit fur about three or four times the length of the hook shank. Clip the fur from the forward eighth-inch or so of skin and then taper the remaining exposed skin. Secure the tapered piece forward of the eyes, at the same time creating a conical head with your wraps of thread. Wrap back to the eyes, pass behind them, and secure the rabbit strip with several more turns of thread.
Step 4: When Ed ties his grub, he whip finishes and applies head cement after step 3. That’s it. Done. An inveterate tinker, I’ve added another step: After securing the rabbit strip behind the dumbbell eyes, I spiral the thread, back and forward, through small sections of fur, much like tying a Matuka streamer. Now I begin to think I’ve got a fly that has something of a dorsal fin. Or more to the point, maybe the divided fur creates the impression of the segmented rubber body of a Kalin’s Grub. I’ll mail Ed a couple of examples and see what he thinks.
