The most remarkable aspect of Charles Frederick Holder’s Recreations of a Sportsman on the Pacific Coast, a remarkable read for any angler who has ever called California home, is not the fabulous fishing and other outdoor sport it describes. Instead, the perceptive reader glimpses these stories through a lens which tells us as much about the present as it does about the past. The face of the state what it is today, it seems nothing short of a miracle that it could have looked so different barely a hundred years ago.
One hundred years. If you haven’t been paying attention, a hundred years is but a blink of an eye; more of us than you might imagine have been fishing at least half that long in our own lives — and if you ask old-timers anywhere, they will tell you it seems like only yesterday that they began their angling journeys. Yet in the relatively brief stretch of time since publication of this and Holder’s other fishing and hunting books, the changes that have occurred in California and California fisheries give the reader a sense the author describes a world as far-fetched as any Pixar or Hollywood fantasy.
One hundred years. I won’t dwell on Holder’s tales of catching salmon in boats rowed out into Monterey Bay, when thirty and forty and fifty-pound white sea bass were a “nuisance” by-catch while the salmon feasted on schools of anchovies as vast as the summer fog out to sea. Nor do I need to share the details of countless billfish battles engaged in along the shores of Catalina and San Clemente Island, nor the size and numbers of yellowtail Holder and pals like Gifford Pinchot and Stewart Edward White and the “Baron” fought on tackle as light as anyone had ever dared using on such powerful prey. All of this is telling in its own right, remarkable fisheries that today pale in comparison, if they exist at all. But for this reader, the single most significant chapter in Holder’s wide-reaching record of California sportfishing is “The Trout Streams of the Missions,” a survey of restful and meditative trout-fishing opportunities with the fly wherever Junipero Serra and his band of Franciscan friars built their famous missions along what ultimately became known as El Camino Real.
If you’re reading this in the lower half of the state, anywhere south, say, of Santa Cruz, picture, if you can, the mission nearest you — or one you recall visiting when your friends or family from out of state arrived on vacation and asked about local culture. Or maybe you remember one of the missions from grade school, when the local district still invested in field trips so that all kids might visit historical sites in their communities. Or some of you may even be lucky enough to hold fond memories of building replicas of one of the missions yourself or with a daughter or son, constructing it out of marshmallows or sugar cubes or tongue depressors, back when you or your kids weren’t tested on knowing the exact same things as children in Texas, Wisconsin, and West Virginia.
Now, whatever the particular mission you have in mind, listen closely to Holder’s thesis: these mission sites were selected, he presumes, because of the beautiful trout streams that ran near them, sites blessed not only by “musical water, but the living rainbows which made joyous every pool to the lover of sport.”
One hundred years. Holder’s survey takes us from the mission San Diego de Alcala north to San Carlos Borromeo on the Rio Carmelo, which Holder describes as a “rare and radiant little stream, whispering of peace and contentment, and abounding in good and game trout.” I can’t disclose how this might fit with the feelings of local anglers about the Carmel River today. Holder goes on to describe “lovely and alluring trout streams” near Mission San Juan Capistrano (San Juan River), Mission San Luis Rey de Francia (San Luis Rey River), Mission La Purísima Concepción (Santa Ynez River), the Encino Valley’s Mission San Fernando Rey de Espagna (Los Angeles River), and Mission San Gabriel (San Gabriel River); he also mentions the trout (and, in some cases, steelhead) streams near San Antonio de Padua, San Antonia de Pala, Santa Clara, San Buenaventura, and San José de Guadalupe — trout streams sprinkled along the first great thoroughfare up the California coast, still resplendent with native and, in many cases, sea-run fish.
One hundred years. Don’t get me wrong: my point here is not to bemoan these extraordinary transformations in California fisheries over such a brief period of time. I get it. Things change. Life — in one form or another — goes on. Every angling generation, I suspect, feels a certain envy toward the opportunities enjoyed by those who came before them. But griping or whining about it does exactly nothing to help you stick the next fish to your fly. My own thesis, instead, is that Holder’s mission trout streams can be viewed as a blessing, a bright beacon above a rugged shore, a signal by which to navigate challenging waters ahead. Trout streams and native fisheries today are a choice, no longer a given scattered throughout the environment as they were just one hundred years ago along this rare and remarkable coast. Look around you; we decide.
Forty-five years ago a single paved road down Baja made it possible for goofy surfers with primitive gear to whack incredible numbers of fish where, in many cases, nobody else had cast flies before. Now, as another new road under construction follows that precious Pacific coast, a road from the oasis at San Ignacio down through once remote surf breaks at Punta Pequeña and Scorpion Bay, I try to imagine what another future student of the sport might think should he or she stumble upon an obscure book — Angling Baja, say — about that lovely and alluring and epic coast.
Will it be, “I can hardly believe it was like that back then”?
Or, “Man, I tell you, we sure are lucky to fish here.”
Forty-five years.
We’re almost halfway there.
All of which brings me to the Governor — a fly nearly two hundred years old, and one of the few named throughout the astonishing trout fishing stories included in Holder’s book. In fact, it’s not Holder who mentions the fly; instead, it appears in a letter to Holder written by California state senator Fred Stratton, from Oakland, who describes the fishing he’s enjoyed over the years on southern Oregon’s Williamson River, “the greatest trout stream,” claims Stratton, “in the world.” Stratton includes a list of several other common flies of the era — Silver Doctor, Royal Coachman, March Brown — but the Governor, writes Stratton, “is, to my mind, the best.”
Ignoring Stratton’s apparent politician’s penchant for hyperbole, we can at least allow that the Governor was his favorite fly. And it’s easy to see why; if you’ve taken anything away from this column over the years, you know how much I value the fish-fooling capacities of peacock herl. Of course, I’m not alone; the list of peacock herl-bodied flies is long, including such traditional favorites as the Leadwing Coachman, Hardy’s Favorite, Light Caddis, and the Alder fly. My own herl-bodied MFT, My Favorite Terresterial, changed my whole approach to big trout; where I once believed I needed to go smaller and finer in order to fool a stream’s best fish, I suddenly found myself using a size ten dry fly to move big trout when nothing else was on the water. If you don’t already have a row or two of peacock-herl-bodied flies in your day-to-day trout box, you’re missing a reliable producer in your lineup.
The Governor would be a good place to start. First described by T. C. Hofland in The British Angler’s Manual (1839), and appearing again in Mary Orvis Marbury’s Favorite Flies and their Histories (1892), it’s a simple tie, with all the elements of the traditional winged wet fly, patterns that go in and out of fashion but, like mid-action rods and long-tapered lines, never disappear. I don’t need to explain why. I will say I like the implications of a particular description from New Zealand for use of the red-tipped Governor, a popular variant of the original: “A great fly as a general beetle-like terrestrial or emerging caddis or something else appealing to trout.” You can go a long way in the game tying flies to your tippet that match something else appealing to trout. I wouldn’t anticipate catching “in one afternoon forty-two trout, the smallest being one and one-half pounds, and the largest eleven pounds,” as Senator Stratton recalls from an early visit to the Williamson; just as I wouldn’t expect my Governor to fool a brace of feisty rainbows at the confluence of Trabuco and San Juan Creek, right below the interstate, after surfing the morning glass at Doheny. The Governor can’t turn back the hands of time. But it might help you keep in mind what rests unchanged at the heart of the sport — casting flies for pretty fish that live and breed in pretty places.
Those of us with less than literal minds might also note the metaphorical cue in a fly called the Governor — especially if we’re asked to consider the changes, over the past hundred years, in the fisheries in our own neighborhoods. The Governor is as effective for trout today as it was when first created nearly two hundred years ago — and it may be just what the engines of change need right now if we hope there’s reason at all, in another hundred years, to tie this pretty fly.
Materials
Hook: 1X fine or 2X stout, size 12-16
Thread: Primrose yellow Pearsall’s Gossamer silk
Tag: Flat gold tinsel
Butt: Yellow tying silk
Body: Peacock herl
Hackle: Brown hen hackle
Wing: Pheasant wing quill
Tying instructions
Step 1: Secure the hook and start the thread. When working with Gossamer silk, you should try to use the minimum number of thread wraps needed to hold materials to the hook. Attach a short length of gold tinsel and wind the thread down into the bend of the hook. Make the tag of the fly out of a single wrap of tinsel. Secure it with a turn of thread and clip the excess. Advance the thread two or three turns to create the yellow butt of the fly forward the gold tag.
Step 2: Create a dubbing loop. Wax both legs of the loop. Insert a single strand of peacock herl and spin your loop until you have a tight dense rope of herl spun into the twisted thread. Wind the rope of thread forward, one wrap in front of the other, without overlapping. Don’t worry if the thread color shows through the herl. That’s part of the effect you’re after. Stop the body far short of the eye of the hook, leaving yourself room for both the hackle and wing.
Step 3: From a soft hackle hen neck select a feather with fibers slightly longer than the width of the hook gap. Strip the webby fibers from the base of the stem. Secure the feather by the stem so that when you wind it forward, the fibers slant back. Make just two wraps with the hackle feather; tie off with a couple of turns of thread. Clip the excess hackle feather and stem.
Step 4: For the wing of the fly, start with a pair of matched primary feathers from the left and right wings of a pheasant. From the same part of each feather, clip a 1/8 to 3/16 inch section. Position the sections so that the concave sides are towards each other, with the tips pointing toward the aft end of the fly. Whether the tips point up or down is your choice and often depends on the shape of the feather tips themselves. The tips should extend almost to the bend of the hook. While holding the wing along the top of the fly, take a loose turn of thread and don’t tighten it until you pull directly upward. Repeat two more times, winding forward the first wrap and remembering the loose wrap and upward pull so that the wing rides directly on top of the hook shank. Clip the butts of the wing and create a tidy head. With silk, you should wax the thread before your whip finish. Saturate the head with lacquer or head cement. The finished fly is displayed on page 18.
