Simplicity is a virtue hard to come by for many fly fishers. When I took up the sport, I spent a small fortune on tackle, for instance, assuming it would improve my game. Flies were my biggest extravagance. I tried tying my own, but I lacked the patience and dexterity. The finished products looked clownish, and no self-respecting trout would ever chase one. Instead, I became an inveterate browser in tackle shops, the old Orvis store in San Francisco being a favorite. I combed through the bins, admiring the choices on offer. As a boy, I collected baseball cards, and I took the same frenzied approach. I wanted to own a complete set, failing to realize no such thing exists with flies.
There were two big negatives associated with my mania. First and foremost was the confusion it caused on a stream. I owned so many flies that I packed two or three big plastic boxes for a trip, the kind with forty or so compartments. They were nothing like the compact Richard Wheatley model I use now. They were much too large to fit in the pocket of my vest. For that purpose, I improvised with a little metal Shimmelpennick cigar box that did the trick. I thought that was pretty clever, but I was wrong. From those variables, I concocted an insanely complicated streamside drill. After checking the conditions and watching for hatches, I chose a couple dozen or so flies to transfer to the Shimmelpennick box. Unlike the big plastic boxes, it didn’t have any compartments, so the flies mingled freely. Whenever I opened it, one of two things happened. I couldn’t find the fly I wanted, because they were all jumbled together, or I dropped a handful into the river, because I was so eager to start casting. Once, I let the whole box slip through my fingers and watched a hundred bucks’ worth of my exotic purchases drift merrily away. Plus, I’d given up smoking and had no more Shimmelpennicks in stock. My other problem involved shifty tackle dealers. We all know the type — “fumbling in the greasy till,” as W. B. Yeats put it. (Yeats must have done some angling. “I dropped the berry in a stream / And caught a little silver trout,” he wrote in “The Song of Wandering Aengus.”) That wasn’t an issue at Orvis, but elsewhere, especially in the small Sierra towns where the season for turning a profit is brief, I fell victim to flimflam artists. They recognized my lean and hungry look and took full advantage. I had seen this happen to my father, who was a bass fisherman. No matter how many lures he owned, and he owned a lot, he was always a sucker for the con. “I agree the Jitterbug is dandy,” a dealer would say, “but when it comes to largemouths, I swear by this Hawaiian Wiggler in chartreuse.”
So I was primed to make the same mistake. I believe there’s something in Freud about repeating the sins of the father. If not, there should be, for I was every bit the same kind of sucker. How in the world did I wind up with three dozen cork-bodied popping bugs? By listening to a tackle dealer in Healdsburg, that’s how. He convinced me they were dynamite for smallmouths on the Russian River, and that was true, but I didn’t need them in eight different sizes. Another time, while fishing the Merced in Yosemite — and this is still shameful to admit — I was induced to buy some flies that imitated Pautzke’s Balls o’ Fire salmon eggs. They were little round yarn items in bright red and absolutely worthless.
I finally wised up on a road trip to Idaho. In spite of my incompetence with flies, I’d become a reasonably competent angler and was ready to try my luck on Henrys Fork of the Snake River during the famous stonefly hatch. Naturally, I stocked up on Golden Stones and Sofa Pillows at Will Godfrey’s old shop in Last Chance, but it didn’t do any good. I’d overestimated my skills and soon grasped that I was competing against some heavyweight anglers, the type who can land a fly on a dime while rolling a smoke with their other hand. “Outclassed” is the word that leaps to mind. After my first day, I wanted to curl up with a big glass of whiskey, which is pretty much what I did.
I had rented a cabin on the Buffalo River nearby. It was part of a funky complex presided over by a resident caretaker who did not appear to have gone very far in school, possibly not beyond the third grade. But he was exactly right for the job, a handyman who could fix anything and didn’t mind getting dirty while he did it. In fact, I think he enjoyed getting dirty. He claimed to love the “great outdoors,” so I told him I’d come across a flock of sandhill cranes while driving around. I’d never seen the birds before. They were flapping their huge wings and making a trumpeting noise. It was a spectacular scene. “Damn,” my new pal said. “I wish I coulda been there. I’d sure like to shoot one of them.” That was our longest and last conversation.
I was so hyped on the Henrys Fork that I hadn’t paid much attention to the Buffalo. That’s understandable. It’s a turbid, slow-moving stream that would disappoint anybody in search of the majestic or even marginally inspiring. I almost wanted to look the other way. But after my dive into the whiskey glass, I noticed fish dimpling the surface, so I gathered up my gear. The caddis were on the wing, and the light was fading fast. I had no time for the usual sifting and sorting and just tied on the first likely imitation. It happened to be a size 16 brown Elk Hair Caddis. I don’t ordinarily brag, or only a little, but I caught a small brookie on virtually every cast. That convinced me of the fly’s powers of attraction. At home, I checked out the provenance of the Elk Hair Caddis. Its inventor was
Al Troth (a name suspiciously close to Trout), who described his handiwork in a 1957 article for Fly Fisherman. He intended to fish it as a wet fly on his home stream in Pennsylvania, but the elk hair, being hollow, floated so well that he turned it into a dry. (The hair came from a female elk. Troth bleached it to increase its visibility.) What appealed to anglers was its elegant simplicity. It was easy to tie (for those who can tie) and very productive in both the hackle and no-hackle variants. I liked its adaptability. I found I could fish it in a dead drift or diving or by skittering it across the water.
I am enough of a skeptic to have doubted my success on the Buffalo. Maybe the river was so ugly nobody ever fished it, I thought, leaving the brookies starved for action. To put the Elk Hair Caddis to the test, I tried it at Bon Tempe Lake in Marin, where I then lived. I often fished Bon Tempe, merely because it was there, but I’d never hooked more than two or three hatchery rainbows in an evening. Planters don’t respond readily to hatches, so the best fish went to bait dunkers and spin fishers. But for me that changed with the Elk Hair. I caught a trout on my third cast and eventually released a holdover rainbow weighing over a pound.
The Elk Hair Caddis continued to deliver, and I came to rely on it as my go-to dry and attractor pattern. Fly fishers often tend to overcomplicate matters, I learned. We get so wrapped up in theory, gear, and materials that it obscures the obvious, which is to enjoy your time on a river or a lake. I appreciate and admire such innovators as Al Troth who advance the sport, but most of us do just fine with the basics. My Wheatley box is pared down to the essentials these days. I can almost count the flies on both hands. Along with Elk Hairs in various colors and sizes, I carry a few Adamses and Blue-Winged Olives and a Dave’s Hopper or two, as well as nymphs such as the Hare’s Ear, Prince, Zug Bug, and Pheasant Tail, with and without bead heads.
Of course, there are times when the conditions demand a specific fly I don’t have. I remember visiting a friend in Bend, Oregon, who took me to Crane Prairie Reservoir which taps the upper Deschutes. It’s a beautiful stillwater fishery with lots of trophy trout. We’d be fishing midges, I was advised, so I bought a few chironomid imitations — but only a few. I was proud of my new discipline, and fate rewarded me with an 18-inch rainbow. As for those old plastic boxes filled with useless flies, I sold them on eBay a while back. The buyer was an angler in Tempe, Arizona, who seemed to believe he got a bargain. I cashed his check and wished him well.
