Harry Smith is the incarnate future of fly fishing. That might seem like an odd thing to say about a man who is 96 and hardly known outside of his circle of fly-fishing friends. However, in the last three decades — about as long as California Fly Fisher has been publishing — Harry Smith has been progressively taking the sport to a place it has never been before.
By the early 2000s, Smith had refined his fly-fishing game to the point of abandoning flies with hooks and traditional rod-and-reel setups and stepped into a new realm. He calls it “air fishing,” and his poetry describes it as:
Another way to say:
. . . How high will fish leap
. . . Striking a hookless fly
. . . Dangling two inches
. . . Below my rod tip?
While Smith has been preaching the air-fishing gospel for about twenty years, the number of converts is tiny. Air fishing does away with reels, just like Tenkara. It is the ultimate permutation of Euro-style fishing’s gospel of staying in constant touch with your fly. It doesn’t just do away with barbs on flies, it does away with the whole hook. Most of all, you don’t have to worry if the fly will float on the surface if you never let it touch the water at all.
I know. I thought Harry Smith was a little askew for a lot of years. Maybe certifiable. There were also times his subtle sense of humor and wry smile sometimes made me think he was just pulling everyone’s leg, a prankster. Now I’m pretty sure he’s the future of our sport.
When I first wrote about Harry Smith for California Fly Fisher back in 1995, the headline said “Harry Smith Gives ’Em The Bird.” The piece detailed the first step in his journey to air fishing. It was a step in fly fishing that many of us take: noticing a fish’s food source and how to fish a good imitation naturally. I wrote back then that if you “combine jack-poling with dapping, you have the basis for this new, quasi-fly-fishing technique that is deadly on largemouth bass.”
So you don’t have to go rummaging around through your back issues or try to find that issue on Amazon and pay and arm and a leg, here’s a slightly edited and annotated version so you understand the genesis of air fishing:
Some anglers thumb their nose at difficult fish. Some anglers throw rocks into the water. Some anglers give up the sport entirely.
Harry Smith gives ’em the bird.
No, no. Not that bird. An imitation bird. A big, fluffy fly pattern that looks like a baby coot or duckling or blackbird.
It is a tactic with a unique set of fly patterns that is catching on for largemouth bass at Southern California’s Oso Lake, a private impoundment in Orange County. Who knows where it will go from here. We can only tell you where it began.
It was just a little over a year ago when Harry Smith, a Santa Ana plastering contractor with a sense of humor and a passion for fly fishing, was out on Oso Lake throwing the bass his pet, the Schnauzer. It’s a Smith fly pattern that’s almost as big and ugly as the dog. It was May 1994, and Harry was float tubing along the tules. It was quiet. Really quiet. The Schnauzer wiggled on the surface, and a bass came up and whacked it in a splashy, loud surface take.
“This was the thing that cemented it for me,” said Smith. “All the coots were way back in the brush, and it was quiet, but when the bass hit the Schnauzer, every coot set up a ruckus. You know why? They knew, ‘There goes one of our offspring.’ You’d see ’em swimming around with five or six in a clutch. The next day, there’d be four, the next day, two or three.
“Those bass will take a big frog, why not a bird,” said Smith, both to himself that day into a recorder he carried with him on the water to log catches and conditions and to me a couple of months later.
That night he tied The Bird. The next day, he caught a fish on it. In the week that followed, he refined the fly, the tackle, and The Bird fishing technique.
Harry Smith had come to our fly-fishing club a couple of years before “The Bird” to talk about fly-rod bass fishing, Oso Lake, and show us how to tie his Schnauzer, his big fly pattern that sort of looked like one of those dogs and moved a lot of water when you twitched it. The Deep Creek Flyfishers met in the San Bernardino County Museum back then, and Harry brought a bunch of weeds and brush into the building and dumped it on the floor, told some funny stories, showed how to tie his fly, and then gave a demonstration about how to fish big bass bugs around brush — the brush he dumped in the back of the room.
There was method to his madness.
Smith was an advocate even then of fishing a short line. Most of his fishing was done by swinging a water-laden bass bug underhand into the good spots 10 to 20 feet from his float tube on big, stiff fly rods. This he demonstrated with the brush and stuff he’d spread all over the museum floor. It was a good graphic display. He gave the rod to one of the club members and had them try it. As they plopped the bug down into a pocket Harry had pointed out on the carpeted floor, Smith pulled a near-invisible piece of nylon monofilament he’d rigged, and a rat trap snapped up, moving brush next to the fly and making everyone in the room jump. The angler who held the rod set the hook reflexively and sent the fly sailing up to the ceiling. There was laughter, and a point was made.
Harry Smith said that was how every bass strike on the surface affects you.
With The Bird, Harry has taken the excitement of the strike to a new level — a closer level, sometimes with almost direct contact with the fish. He found that with The Bird, he was fishing the heaviest cover where the baby birds would most likely be found.
“There’s no way to cast in that stuff. So we use a 10-weight or 12-weight rod and four feet of 25-pound test leader — and that’s all,” said Smith.
The Bird is dangled off the end of a really stiff fly rod and dapped and poked into pockets of water around the dense brush. Sometimes you pull the fly right up to the rod tip, push it way back into a little hole of water deep in the brush, and then plop The Bird on the surface and wiggle it around to bump it against brush and branches like a little bird trying to climb back up.
When a fish strikes in situations like this, the game becomes sort of like commercial tuna fishing: You jack-pole the fish out of the heavy cover. Littler fish might actually get airborne. Bigger bass put deep bends even in stout rods and will get into the brush in spite of your best and most natural reaction to yank their face off.
“Imagine that. If a bass boil at 40 feet gets a fly fisherman’s rocks off, imagine how many of his rocks he’ll get off when it boils at 9 feet. I’ve had ‘em 6 feet from me,” said Smith, laughing. “Body parts could explode.”
“The best of all: I will guarantee you the whole world can be falling in around you, and you won’t know it, because your attention is always right out there on that fly. You’re sitting on pins and needles every second you’re out there.”
Call it adventure bass fishing. The strikes are close and vicious. Smith has even been injured while fishing The Bird. One bass charged the fly, coming toward him. With the rod tip in its mouth, it drove the whole rod back at Smith, mashing the butt of the rod into the heel of his hand, bruising it. Rods are broken on occasion. How many guys would really like to say they actually had a fish break a rod, rather than admitting they slammed it in a trunk?
It’s pretty clear that Harry Smith is more than a little different than your average fly fisher. Not too many of us carry small tape players with us to record all the catches and strikes we get in a day of fishing. Not too many of us fish patterns that look like birds or dogs. Most of us cast our fly rods. Harry Smith is way different.

He also talks to his computer. Well, I yell at my computer, so that’s not so bad, I guess. But Harry knows that his computer talks back. At a fishing show a couple of years ago, Harry gave me a manuscript he said was cowritten by the two of them — by him and his computer. It was pretty good. [Today, Harry credits the computer with assisting on nine volumes of poetry.] The writing was a little weird, in a Brautigan sort of way, but good, and I told Harry I wouldn’t give the computer any credit if I were him. I mean, if he were to sell a book and it made lots of money, the computer would just want Harry to waste it all on more RAM or storage memory or a high-speed connection to the internet so it could socialize. I mean, how’s it going to find out?
Not that it matters much, but now I wonder who’s idea this Bird thing really was? After all, the computer does get all that data from Harry’s recorder.
Fly fishing today, in 2023, is a unique blend of age-old traditions wrapped into and around the most technologically advanced fishing tackle in the world. Fly anglers were the first to see the benefits of graphite fibers for use in fishing rods. Spaceage microballoons — tiny, hollow glass balls designed to make space-age compounds lighter — were first used in the fishing industry to make fly lines float. And more synthetic fibers are used to create flies than ever before.
Yet fly anglers cling to casting and fishing methods that have changed little in five hundred years. Whether fly anglers are hurling huge flies to ocean fish or delicately dropping a size 22 mayfly pattern into a trout’s feeding lane, the sport is still mostly about delivering a fly on the surface to a visible quarry so we can see — see! — and know we have duped the fish into taking our imitation.
The sport always has been about a visible strike to an imitative fly that mimics some natural food. That is likely to never change. Fly anglers live for the strike: the gentle tip up of a trout to a tiny dry fly; the tip down of a bonefish on a saltwater flat; the streaking swirl of a bonito eating a streamer off a breakwater, or the eruptive strike of a largemouth bass on a popping bug in a lily-pad-covered pond.
Oh, we’ll fish sunken flies where we can’t see the strike, watching strike indicators or waiting to feel the jolt of a solid take, if that’s the only alternative, but if there are binoculars for bird watching or someone willing to play cribbage, we may do that instead, if we can’t see the strike. The strike is fly fishing’s holy grail.
Harry Smith was trying to bring that holy grail into his lap. He pioneered the use of long, stout fly rods and short leaders with his first Bird patterns fished in tight cover where the bass lived.
Harry’s observations led to a realization that bass (and most other fly-caught fish species) often will come back and try to eat a fly again if they miss it the first time — or if an angler jerks the fly away from the fish when it erupts on the lure. His recorder and on-the-water videotapes documented this time and time again. So he simply cut off the hook at the bend. It also made The Bird more imitative (if that really mattered to the bass). That was the beginning of hookless fishing for Smith.
He was a step closer to the holy grail of a fly-fishing world filled only with explosive strikes that make your heart and words stutter. Without a hook jabbing the fish in the mouth, the frequency of repeated strikes went way up. It also was a close-up look at the predatory nature of bass that fly anglers didn’t get to witness as often.
“Sometimes they’re just like a dog with a rat. I’ve had ’em take the fly, go under my tube, and then stop and shake it — just like a dog,” said Smith when I interviewed him at a fly-fishing show in Southern California in 2005 for a newspaper story about his hookless Bird fly.
I remember nodding my head and reading the sign by his tying vise: “Hookless, the new millennium of catch and release. No catch, only release.”
Smith was there among fabled fly tyers at that show. There was a video loop running next to him while we spoke. Smith stopped talking when he saw me refocus from him to the film. This particular sequence showed five slashing strikes by the same fish in just a few seconds. I watched it again recently while visiting with Smith. It always makes your pulse race.
Smith knows the strike is the adrenaline rush — the “why” of fly fishing.
“The strike is the ‘10.’ Everything else after that quickly counts back down to zero. So I just eliminate all those things and go for the big rush, repeatedly,” said Smith back then after I had refocused on him.
He eliminates worrying about hooking the fish and then keeping it out of the brush so it can be landed. He doesn’t worry about whether or not netting or lipping will hurt the fish before he releases it. He doesn’t have to struggle to unhook the fish. The bass eventually lets go of The Bird. The rod tip springs back up, and Smith can instantly go back to dancing the fly on the surface. More times than not, the bass will take The Bird again. And again.
Smith’s videos give you some idea of how much adrenaline you can jolt into your veins. Many of the segments show the same bass striking and missing and striking again. How many jolts can your heart take in one day and not give out? Harry laughed when I asked that question and then smiled. His best day was four hundred strikes in three hours of float tubing at Oso Lake in Orange County. Fifty to 75 strikes were common morning counts. With hooked flies, 20 strikes and 12 or 15 fish landed was a phenomenal day.
An aside, I have to confess that after I wrote that newspaper back story in 2005, I started dabbling in what I call “very dry fly” fishing. It was Harry’s inspiration or sense of humor that drove me to it.
Many years ago, before I met Harry Smith, I was fishing Southern California’s Deep Creek. The fishing stunk, as it can do anywhere. One of my poorly tied, sort-of-Adams flies was on the end of the leader while I moped beside the seemingly dead stream. A big lizard popped up on a nearby rock, I dapped my fly in front of him, and he ate it, lip-hooked. I swung the lizard over to me, giggling. I was one of those kids who had grown up catching lizards in the vacant fields and grape vineyards by the house in South Fontana. When the lizard ate the fly, my mind immediately flashed to those days and the vague wish that I had thought of using the stout Garcia fly rod I’d received for my ninth birthday. However, the hook had made a bloody hole in its lip, and I apologized to the lizard as I let him go, hoping the wound would heal quickly. That was the last time I fished for lizards. At least until I met Harry Smith.

I spend a lot of time in the desert, as much a desert rat as a fly fisher. After speaking with Harry and watching his videos of a hookless Bird in action, I snipped off the bend of some of my poorly floating dry flies and put them in the compartments of a small fly box that became known as the reptile box. You saw where this was going didn’t you?
Repeatedly, I have tried to get Richard Anderson to let me write a story for this magazine about the best hookless patterns for the wide variety of lizards that live across my beloved Mojave Desert. For example, a good red ant pattern is essential to get any takes from the increasingly rare horned lizards (we called them “horny toads” as kids). Lizards’ reactions to fake bugs can be entertaining. Some won’t let go until you actually lift them off the ground. Others won’t let go until they are about to come to hand. Chuckwallas love big grasshopper patterns crawled up to them. The speedy fringe-toed lizard is shy and requires long casts and stealth, but it will run over and eat any well-presented hookless dry fly if not spooked.
Anderson was interested until I started talking about rattlesnakes and how it would take a very innovative pattern that was able to maintain the body temperature of a baby kangaroo rat for the snake to strike. I think he thought I was kidding, and I’ve never written the story.
Harry Smith is nothing if not an innovator. While four hundred strikes in three hours can make for a heady morning, Harry was still 8 to 9 feet away from the action in his float tube. He had whittled the distance between angler and fish from 50 to 60 feet with cast flies down to 20 to 30 feet with flopped-out Schnauzers, then down to 8 or 9 feet with the hookless Bird. He wondered how he could get closer to the action. He wanted water splashed on his face when the fish jumped on the fly.
The Glove was the next step in his eventual evolution into complete air fishing. Using a heavy-duty glove, Harry attached three stout fiberglass rod tip sections to the first three fingers of the glove. Each of the rods was about three feet long. With Bird patterns tied to each rod top on a six-inch section of stout monofilament, Smith now was able to dance and swim a whole brood of coots in heavy cover. Sometimes he would use marabou shad imitations and fish them in the surface film like feeding minnows.
Now Harry Smith was getting takes so close he frequently had to stop fishing and clean the water droplets off his glasses. It was still not enough for the innovator.
Air fishing was the next evolutionary step for Harry Smith. “I keep wondering what new I can do. It was air fishing. I want to see how high I can make them jump. It’s get-even time. All my life, I’ve been trying to get fish to take my fly. Now I won’t let them have it,” said Smith.
This required a different fly pattern, one that was meant to fly above the water naturally and not touch the surface except perhaps occasionally. Harry teamed up with the late Carl Ramsey, a well-known commercial artist and extraordinary fly tyer from Los Angeles. The pair conspired to make the perfect dragonfly imitation. Ramsey used an entomological text that had precise, life-size drawings of dragonfly wings and their venation, copied them onto mylar, and then hand-colored them to match the natural. The finished fly has a midfly leader attachment and is flown just over the top of the water like the real thing. It stays dry — at least until a bass snatches it out of the sky. That was the way Harry fished for bass until he retired his rods and The Glove six years ago.
At 96, Harry Smith is in an assisted care facility, because his walking is a little shaky, and he needs a walker. He has all of his old videos — now digitized — so he can go fishing any time on the big screen. The Glove and his old fiberglass fly rod with the first six inches of tip covered in tooth marks from the bass are in the room. The Glove is adorned with three hookless marabou shad patterns. The rod has the hookless dragonfly.
When I visited recently, Harry wanted to show me some video he was pretty sure I hadn’t seen. He had me hold onto the dragonfly-adorned fly rod and dangle it in front of the television screen. The fly was dancing right next to the one on the video screen when a bass came clear of the water’s surface to try to grab the fly. I reflexively set the hook, and we both started laughing. That bass came back time and time again to leap for the dragonfly pattern. On the twelfth jump, it caught the fly by the tail and dragged it under the water.
“I wanted to see how high I could make them jump. We even started naming the jumps. There’s the rainbow, the back flip, the double reverse, and the belly flop. I’ve had one that tail-walked four to five feet across the water,” said Smith.
Traditionalist fly anglers are not quite sure of how to react to a guy who dances hookless imitative flies over the surface for bass just to get them angry or hungry enough to strike. Will they try the same thing with caddis patterns for trout? Midge patterns for bluegills? In spite of Harry’s almost ubiquitous presence at fly-fishing shows across Southern California in the early 2000s, hookless fishing and air fishing never caught on. At least not yet.

Harry’s old steelhead fishing friend, the late Lani Waller, explained why that was the case: “It’s so far off of what people think of fly fishing, and you’re removing the drama of fly casting. You’ve got to build a bridge from the traditional fly fishing method to air fishing.”
Harry’s bridge: “I’m old. I’m tired. I’m tired of fishing in the water. So now I just fish out of the water. I’m an air fisherman,” said Smith, smirking.
Part of the problem is that some anglers have a hard time drawing the line be- tween Smith’s serious fishing side and his wry sense of humor. He loves to say that he “gives bass The Bird,” and when talking about The Glove, he’ll look at you with an ever-so-slight grin and say, “My problem with The Glove is I can’t tell which finger the bass want.”
But Smith is serious, too. He sees this as the next logical step in fly fishing. On heavily fished waters, hookless angling would eliminate fish mortality and all of the mouth scarring and ripped lips that are so common now. I’ve decided that Harry is just way ahead of his time.
After all, for fly anglers it is all about the strike.