Once the middle-school girls finish their cross-country season, Coach Wrye starts packing for a trip to the Snake and the Grand Ronde. For most of us, it’s pretty late to be swinging surface patterns, but Steve Wrye’s one of those guys who’s been doing it for so long, it’s as though he doesn’t know any other way to fish for steelhead. Can you blame him? Whether fishing for trout, bass, roosterfish, or backwater bluegills, most everyone agrees that moving fish to the surface and seeing them eat the fly offers the defining moment that separates fly fishing from all other forms of angling while going a long way to remind us why we fell for the game in the first place.
But there’s more to it than that. This fall, when steelhead began showing up in river conditions that give surface presentations their best odds, a young hotshot I know got his first-ever fish on a waking pattern — and then, from the same pool, two more steelhead that rose through the river’s silky sheen and ripped its fabric to shreds. This is one of those guys who came of age during the onset of the modern Spey rod era and who now throws those tight, immaculate loops that seem constrained by nothing but the size of the river itself. He catches tons of steelhead, and you figure an angler like this has been waking steelhead to the surface like my lawn gives up dandelions. His first ones? Naturally, he was blown away: “I can’t believe I haven’t tried it before,” another buddy reported him saying. “What have I been doing with my life?”
When I tell this story to Coach Wrye, he shakes his head. Kids. Wrye, it should be noted, belongs to that generation of sportsmen in which juvenile behavior has, for many of us, segued seamlessly into senior discounts, Medicare, and, of late, disturbing intimations of senility. Plus, there’s not a one of us who hasn’t been made more aware of death than we’ve ever been aware of death before. Life’s short and getting shorter, says the reproachful wag of Coach Wrye’s white-whiskered bald head.
A steelheader who doesn’t fish wakers? What has he been doing with his life?
It’s a mindset, I suspect, more than anything else. Or maybe a matter of style. Why do we go fishing? Once we throw off the shackles of bait, we’re free to imagine all manner of seductions, the best of which demand the most of us as casters, hunters, naturalists, and savvy or even sanguinary sportsmen. When an angler chooses a fly rod and flies, he or she commits to a path that leads elsewhere than the simple goal of catching fish. Of course, we all want to hook and land our share. But there’s something much larger at work, I’d argue, for those of us who have given up so much to have so little to show for an angling life.
Old sailor, surfer, and boatman, Steve Wrye contends that it’s a matter of form following function. What are you fishing for? What are you trying to get from the sport? From a day on the water?
You use a waker when steelheading because that is steelheading.
At least in the fall.
At least when there are enough fish around to give you a fair shot.
“And there’s always a chance a fish will rise to a waking fly,” says Wrye.
Despite his scheduled departure on his trip, Wrye has conceded to a visit to The Roost. He usually hates this kind of scene. His strict opinions about virtually everything to do with sports include a general disdain for flies with names or the specifics of any pattern.
He fits right in. Ask him about any aspect of any fly in his box that he’s tied, and he’ll say it doesn’t matter. Practically any fly will wake, he claims, if you Riffle Hitch it, fish it on a floating line, and swing it in the kind of current in which steelhead generally lie.
Really?
By way of illustration, Wrye hands me a fly he says is pretty much all he uses these days. With its tinsel ribbing and white wing, the fly looks a lot like something Randall Kaufmann might have tied thirty years ago for the Deschutes — and
not at all like the sensuous Spey flies or antagonizing Intruders now so popular in watersheds along the northeastern Pacific. Wrye seems perfectly at ease with my suggestion that even the traditionalists who frequent The Roost might find the pattern a wee bit old-fashioned.
“I guess I’ll worry about what the fish think,” he says.
Although this is a fly-tying column, I feel once more that a mention of presentation tactics is in order. Form follows function. If you know how you intend to fish a fly, you’ll do a better job creating the look you need.
In his rightfully famous tome Steelhead Fly Fishing, Trey Combs offers a concise description of his own introduction to the “riffling hitch” and his eventual understanding of fishing waking flies. “When a properly dressed wet fly with a turned up eye has been hitched and brought under tension,” he writes, “the head pulls up until it breaks through the surface to create a V wake.”
This head breaking through the surface, however, is somewhat misleading. Many anglers confuse this idea with skating, rather than waking. A true waking fly isn’t seen. The notion that your fly is poking its head out of the water like a curious otter or seal is a different technique — effective, at times, but never as consistently as a fly underwater that touches the surface just enough to leave a trail-like wake as though scratching the underside of a ceiling of glass.
A hitched fly, anyway, is the surest way to get a fly under tension to create a wake. The hitch is nothing more than one or two Half Hitches formed with the tippet around the head of the fly. Cast across the river and to some degree downstream, the fly drags against the current, doing what any wet fly does on the swing, but with exaggerated fluctuations of movement caused by its misaligned attitude to the leader.
Despite its unnatural track, a true waker makes a subtle offering, nothing like the raucous gyrations of your heavily dressed skaters. In fact, many traditional steelhead dressings will do. “I prefer a somewhat sparse and drab wet fly to hitch,” says Combs, “one that entices rather than startles.”
This gets to the heart of the matter — and the stance Steve Wrye takes with his own flies swung waking through classic steelhead lies. Nobody really knows why this is such an effective way to move steelhead, but then nobody really knows why anything besides egg patterns and big stonefly nymphs get steelhead to bite. What most of us who employ surface presentations imagine, however, is that a fish looking up at the surface of the river, a vast screen backlit by the sky, can see a waking fly and can watch it swing toward it for a long, long way. In the specific sort of current that steelhead favor, it requires virtually no energy for the fish to pivot or rotate its pectoral fins as though they are ailerons, rise to the surface, and intersect the course of this swinging fly. Why one cast and waking swing produces a strike and hundreds or even thousands of others don’t is a question that should, by all counts, bedevil us forever. What is it we’re fishing for if not immersion in the ineffable and sublime?
For many old-school stylists, the answer begins with the mesmerizing V spreading behind a waking fly. Hitched, “almost any conservatively dressed fly will work,” states Combs. It’s a bold assertion, one difficult for the uninitiated to embrace. For Steve Wrye, it’s an obvious truth — and the reason he disregards any serious questions about this kind of dubbing or that kind of tailing material.
Still, it’s a real fly tied from honestto-god materials that Coach Wrye feels obliged to leave behind at The Roost. And when I take Steve’s Waker to the bench and cut it apart for closer inspection, I begin to sense all of the usual prejudices and superstitious mumbo jumbo that infuse the patterns of so many longtime steelheaders. Steve doesn’t own up to this material or the other, I suspect, because these are his secrets — not necessarily things that other anglers don’t know, but a private recipe born out of a lifetime of unprovable theories developed while watching the fly swing like the hand of clock through one season and the next. Whatever it is Steve Wrye’s fishing for, it’s all come to this: some fur and feathers and faith in a waking fly.
And it’s a faith, I’m happy to report, that still pays off. In the following week, on a well-known stretch of river that most readers could reach in a day’s drive, Steve uses his old-fashioned waker to land three fish over 12 pounds — plus a buck that noses past the 40-inch mark, his biggest steelhead ever.
Wakers, of course, aren’t for everyone. It depends on what you’re fishing for.
Materials
Hook: TMC 7989 or similar, size 4
Thread: Black
Underbody: Strip of thin (2-millimeter) fly foam
Tail: Bronze Antron yarn
Tag: Narrow gold tinsel
Body: Black seal fur, or substitute
Ribbing: Narrow gold tinsel
Wing: Polar bear or appropriate substitute
Hackle collar: Ringneck pheasant nape
Tying Instructions
Step 1: Secure the hook in the vise, start the thread, and cover the shank of the hook with a layer of thread. On top of the length of the hook shank, attach a strip of foam (2 millimeters by 2 millimeters, or 1/16 inch by 1/16 inch). Lash and compress the foam by working the thread forward and back along its length.
Step 2: For the tail, tie in a short length of Antron yarn. Take one turn of thread under the root of the tail to make it stand proud.
Step 3: At the root of the tail, attach enough tinsel for eventually ribbing the fly. For the tag, take three turns of tinsel below the tail (or above, it doesn’t matter). Tie off with a wrap or two of thread and leave the tinsel hanging out of your way.
Step 4: For the body, create a dubbing loop at the root of the tail. Wax the loop thread liberally. The seal fur dubbing that I use (from old Russian army coats) is stiff and spiky; you want it to just sort of lie on the waxed thread until you spin the dubbing tool. When you do, you’ll end up with a bristly rope. Wind it forward, stroking the wild hairs toward the back of the fly. Tie off and trim at the front end of the compressed foam.
Step 5: Spiral the tinsel rib in five or six evenly spaced turns to the front of the body. Tie it off and clip the excess.
Step 6: Calf tail, bucktail, bleached deer hair or elk hair, or even synthetics all make perfectly good white hair wings on steelhead flies. But many old-timers came upon some polar bear hair long ago in their lives, and it’s pretty hard to stop using it while there’s any still left in the stash. Whatever you use, tie in a fairly sparse wing, one that extends to about the root of the tail.
Step 7: Ringneck pheasants have a lot of different kinds of feathers, and when I asked Steve Wrye which ones he uses for the hackle collar, he gave his usual noncommittal, disdainful shrug. But when I offered up the skin of a whole bird I had hanging out in the boatshed, Wrye pointed specifically to the eyed feathers that resemble jungle cock in the patch that can be found directly at the back of the bird’s neck. This was my first clue that Steve pays a little more attention to the details of his pattern than he lets on. Strip one side of the feather and tie it in by its tip. Wind the feather forward, taking no more than two or three turns to create a fairly sparse hackle collar while leaving plenty of room behind the eye of the hook for the possible use of a Riffle Hitch. Form a tidy head and saturate it with lacquer.
