I spent some time on the phone the other day with one of those film guys who has done so much of late to redefine the fly-fishing experience. We resolved the business end of our conversation pretty quickly — and before long he asked about the steelhead season. Last year he made it out to the coast, and for the first time in his life he had hooked and landed sea-run fish. This year he’s feeling the pinch of the hobbled economy — and like a lot of us, he’s had to resign himself to finding sport closer to home.
I didn’t suggest he try to imagine keeping a fishing career afloat writing stories.
Instead, I confessed that this was one of those years when I catch a few more steelhead than other years. I didn’t go into it much; I didn’t want him to feel bad for not making it out this season. And the truth is, the increased success I’ve enjoyed has had little to do with the fishing itself.
In a way, it’s sort of sad. Or discouraging. For from all I can tell, the only reason I’ve caught more steelhead this year is because I’ve spent more time fishing for them.
Odd though it may seem, this direct proportion between time spent fishing for steelhead and the number of steelhead caught is perhaps the single biggest reason anglers back away from the sport — even if they’ve enjoyed steelheading success in the past. For tell me: Who wants to come out a “winner” just because you take more turns rolling the dice? Is it really nothing more than an endurance contest? The longer you stay out there, the more fish you catch?
Because if that’s all there is to it — Well, it is.
And it isn’t.
Somewhere in the twists and turns of another recent phone conversation, I mentioned to my old pal Peter Syka that steelheading reminds me of casting flies in the surf: You spend all this time without anything happening — and then, out of nowhere, something shows up.
“Well, that might be true,” said Peter. “But there’s a big difference.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“When you do catch something, it’s a steelhead.”
He had me there.
All of which suggests the sort of cryptic steelhead “wisdom” that can seem artless and obvious on the one hand or, on the other, profound as a Zen koan. I talked to a guy recently who begged me to give him advice. He’s fished three winters for steelhead and failed to hook a fish. He explained how he was nymphing, drifting weighted Egg-Sucking Leeches and egg patterns under an indicator — pretty much de rigueur on the local beat, even if a few of us continue to swing flies all winter, just to keep our loops in shape. The guy had run into me at a downtown bookstore; he wanted to set up a meeting, a chance to talk when I might have a little more time. I assured him that wouldn’t be necessary. It sounded like he was doing everything right. I wouldn’t be able to add anything more.
“The only problem is,” I said, “you’re not catching any fish. Other than that —” “I know I’m not catching any,” he said, a wee bit exasperated. “Three winters. So what do I do this winter?”
“You still want to catch a steelhead?” I asked.
“Of course I do.”
“Then keep fishing. That’s the only way you will.”
Fortunately, I long ago passed the age when stating the obvious could lead to fisticuffs. Now, I’m generally acknowledged as 1) old school or 2) old fart.
It’s hard to know which label fits best. Clearly, the more time spent steelheading, the less certain one becomes about any and all notions beyond a few obvious truths. Among the serious steelheaders I know on rivers I frequent throughout the steelhead season, it’s perfectly apparent that there are no silver bullets, no secret recipes, and no magic formulae for success. The default wisdom is that nobody knows shit. Of course, the fact that these same anglers catch a fair number of steelhead each year undermines this modest assessment of insight and knowledge — leaving novices and newcomers with the sneaking suspicion that somebody’s holding out on them. They’re not. Instead, successful steelheaders embrace — sometimes with fatalistic glee — the simple truths available to all of us while at the same time rejecting any and all superfluous notions about how to execute the business at hand. This attention to the obvious is why steelheading so often gets folded into impressions of a spiritual practice — or at least the ideas of such rigors held by angling laymen, often those with a bent for tawny weeds, firewater, and other forms of hedonism.
Don’t worry. I won’t go there. Mention of spiritual practice is simply a way of illustrating that steelheading, like life, demands nothing of us we don’t already know. Which isn’t to suggest there’s a single thing easy about either of these pursuits. When’s the last time you really tried to treat everyone as you would like to be treated?
And when have any of us been able to maintain our focus, cast after cast, on the only two truths we need when steelheading?
You don’t catch fish without your fly in the water.
You catch steelhead where steelhead are.
So few truths, I’m trying to suggest here, are precisely what makes steelheading all but impossible to master. Instead, steelheading is a practice. You show up. You do the things you know you’re supposed to do. You keep at it. Now and then you catch fish. Sometimes things go well, sometimes exceptionally well, and you catch plenty of fish. But the best steelheaders I know fish within a very tight range of options. Essentially, it’s the same casts, the same flies, the same lines, the same lies — over and over and over again — regardless whether they’re catching fish or not. As I mentioned earlier, this is the reason many anglers quit steelheading; they come to view it as nothing more than a chore — or an act of humility, even submission, to all that they can’t control.
Most of us waver, as well, when faced with doing what we know we should do when things seem to go contrary to our desires.
Our practice suffers.
Or we shitcan the whole deal.
Because the truth is, it’s hard to stick to it — especially in the face of inconclusive or even nonexistent results. Remember, now, I’m talking about steelheading. The most difficult thing about it is that often — very often — you shouldn’t do anything other than what you’re doing, because you’re already doing everything right. Naturally, we can all grow frustrated when we fail to catch fish. But if the trials of steelheading were as tidy as catching or not catching fish, it would have never left behind the trail of troubled and confused and occasionally defeated anglers that color the course of its relatively brief and recent history. For steelheading has proven to be, again and again, a merciless taskmaster, enervating, at times, the strongest of anglers among us, while driving no small number of them to drink.
A couple of examples. My buddy Jeff Cottrell was in the throes of a midseason slump this year, the kind we all seem to suffer at one point or another. He was tempted to run a nymph down the throat of a favorite run. Instead, he tied on a big, dark, articulated thing on the theory that — well, the truth is, there’s never a theory worth the time it takes to repeat it, because that’s all you have: another theory in the face of the insufferable mysteries of steelheading. Anyway, preparing cast number 9,999 without a fish, Jeff put the fly up-stream with a Snap-T, and then he circled around with his rod tip to form his D loop. While the fly was lying dead in the water, nothing more than a big black clump of fuzz, a pretty little hen came up and ate it — and just like that, Jeff was out of his slump. Example two. It wasn’t exactly a slump
I was in, but I’d had three or four good pulls in a row on which I’d failed to connect. You begin to wonder if you’re leading the fly too hard, or following it too much, or holding too long or too short of a loop, or dropping your loop too soon. Or too late.
I came down through a treasured piece of water, one perfectly designed for a swinging fly, with boulders and slots and ribbons of current — and as the fly swung into the shallows, something grabbed, straightened the line, turned the reel once, and vanished.
Yuck.
I went through all the usual steps, backing up, fishing through again, changing to a smaller fly, a bigger fly, etcetera, etcetera. Forty-five minutes later, I was all set to leave, hike up to the next run. I even had my daypack on. But once I climbed up onto the bank, I suddenly decided to turn around and try again. I started back in with the same fly I had used earlier, the one that was grabbed and dropped — and before I made a real cast, while I was swinging the fly about a dozen feet below me to clear the short sink tip I had on, a big fish grabbed. Not really big, but well past the thirty-inch mark, the first of six fish, it turns out, I’ve landed there in the past three weeks, the last one this morning, on the same twelve-foot cast that worked the first time.
This time I did it on purpose.
My point, of course, is that this kind of thing can drive you absolutely bonkers. You do everything right, you get a grab, you miss the fish. You do everything wrong, the fish eats, game’s on.
The more you steelhead, the more this kind of thing happens.
There’s a lesson there — but I have little or no idea what it is.
Still, i believe there is hope for steelheaders. We’re not entirely at the mercy of the gods. In my own convoluted thinking about the sport, of which this essay is yet one more example, I’ve fashioned a corollary to offset some of the grimmer ramifications of the notion that the surest way to catch more steelhead is to spend more time fishing for them.
To wit: You catch more steelhead when you fish for them in the manner you enjoy catching them. No doubt, this is not a profound piece of wisdom. What it suggests, however, is that you’ll keep at it, and keep at it longer, if you enjoy the hunt as much as the kill — metaphorically speaking, of course. In my own career, like so many others today, “enjoying the hunt” has meant learning to cast a two-handed rod — and continuing to learn about the elegance of the tool as rods and lines evolve. I’m not a casting junkie — one look at my loop will tell you that — but I’m a firm believer that better casts make for better presentations, and better presentations catch more fish, despite the squirrelly, illogical nonsense that invariably creeps into different moments of our steelheading days.
A good Spey caster, of course, can cast anything. But I don’t know anyone who enjoys throwing a leader jacked up with weight or a bobber affixed to it. I do it — sometimes. But it’s never fun.
Or pretty.
Occasionally, I even catch fish this way. But not as often as I might, because truth be known, I usually tire pretty quickly of such efforts, since nothing about them seems elegant in the way that fly fishing generally invites me to feel. Catching a steelhead is always fun. But in the meantime. . . .
So it goes. If you enjoy how you’re fishing, you will fish more and, in the long run, catch more fish.
I think that’s pretty much the point of fly fishing in the first place, isn’t it?
My favorite way to fish for and catch steelhead is, as I’ve often mentioned, with a waking fly, patterns for which I’ve shared in these pages and elsewhere as both the Remuddled and my Waking Muddler. The window for fishing surface steelhead flies, however, is painfully small — and this year I found myself spending more and more time with traditional Spey flies on the end of my leader as I failed to raise fish with the unconventionally sparse Muddlers I’ve relied on over the years.
Now, another truth shared by veteran steelheaders is that your fly doesn’t matter — a notion that can only contribute to the nuttiness of the sport. The more steelheading you do, the more you understand about the meaninglessness of fly patterns. Eventually, everybody knows this — yet almost nobody believes it.
What a new pattern is mostly about is rekindling your stoke. Do you think for a minute I would have tinkered with the Waking Muddler had fish been rising to it as they had in the past? There are countless reasons my tried-and-true patterns might not have moved fish. Or no reasons at all. All I can do is report that as soon as I created the Green Butt Muddler, I caught my first steelhead of the season on a surface fly. For the next month, it was the only waking fly that rose fish.
Of course, it’s the only pattern I tried.
Tying the Green Butt Muddler
Hook: Wilson dry fly, size 8
Thread: Pearsall’s Gossamer Silk, Highlander Green
Butt: Silk floss, light green
Rib: Lagartun oval tinsel, silver, small
Body: Peacock herl
Head/Wing: Sparse spun deer hair, trimmed, with a few strands straying back
Step 1: Secure the hook in the vise. The Wilson dry-fly hook by Partridge of Redditch remains the lightest-wire hook I know. Fighting a steelhead, I remember that I can bend this same hook with a stout tying thread.
Step 2: Start your Pearsall’s silk thread. I like this thread because it’s strong enough to spin deer hair, plus, it shows through the peacock herl when I spin my a dubbing loop. Also, it’s totally old school
Step 3: At the start of the hook bend, secure a length of tinsel and a length of floss. Good French tinsel can withstand time in a toothy steelhead’s mouth. The same goes for silk floss — which is much tougher than nylon/rayon material such as Uni-Floss.
Step 4: Advance the thread to the middle of the hook. Create the butt (actually, about half of the body) with the floss. Tie off and clip the excess.
Step 5: Create a dubbing loop. Advance the thread to the head. Insert three or four strands of peacock herl into the loop. Spin the loop, creating a peacock herl noodle with silk thread inside. Create the body by winding the herl noodle to the head. Tie off and clip the excess.
Step 6: Rib the fly with the tinsel, making an equal number of evenly spaced turns around both the butt and the body. Tie off at the head and clip the excess.
Step 7: Spin and clip the deer-hair head, leaving a dozen or two strands extending back to the bend of the hook.
This step is the crux of the fly. I use the softest deer hair I can find. Do not overdress. What many anglers don’t understand is that a waking pattern this sparse creates the wake from beneath the surface. This fly has none of the bulk or flotation elements of a skating pattern. You don’t see the fly when it’s swinging. In fact, now that we’re nearly all making eighty or hundred-foot or longer casts with our two-handed rods, you probably won’t be able to see this fly wake — unless, late in the day, in a slick tailout or run, you catch glimpses of that telltale V opening across the water. Often, seeing the wake will only get you into trouble. Focusing on the exact placement of the fly, you see something disturb the surface of the water and, instinctively, you lift the rod tip to see what’s going on. Unfortunately, this is the precise moment you should, instead, be giving the rod tip, the line, and the fly to the fish. If you don’t, chances are you’ve already pulled the fly from the fish’s mouth — or you’ve stuck the fly on the very front of the fish’s mouth or the tip of its nose, which nearly insures an eventual unbuttoning if the steelhead behaves in the manner you hope to see.
Scott Sadil
