Though I love the sport of fly fishing, I’d never brag about my technique. I’m always eager to improve my skills, and I suspect that’s true of many people. If it weren’t for us, the experts would go out of business. Like the consumers of self-help manuals, we’re forever looking for some good, solid advice to correct our flaws. Rivers are in constant flux, and anglers should be, as well. If you hope to catch trout, you must adapt to change. For years, I relied on my angling library for help, but recently, I decided to give the Internet a try. The results, as you’ll see, were a mixed bag.
When I searched for “fly fishing advice,” Stevie Munn came up first. He’s a pro guide who blogs for Hardy of England. It took me a while actually to read Stevie’s blog, because I got distracted by the gorgeous rods pictured on the website. Who wouldn’t want to own a Hardy Zephrus DH, a four-piece two-hander that could be yours for a mere thousand bucks? The reels were seductive, too, long a company specialty. Beautifully manufactured, they had a sculptural integrity. I wouldn’t be surprised to see one in a museum display case. In fact, there’s a House of Hardy Museum in Alnick, where the company has its headquarters. The founder, in 1872, was William Hardy, initially a gunsmith. Zane Grey, who wrote Riders of the Purple Sage, became the firm’s most high-profile customer.
Stevie Munn offered seven tips for fly fishers. His tone was friendly and even humble, the sort of guy you’d gladly hoist a pint with after a day on the Test or the Itchen. He had a fine sense of humor, too, although his father apparently took the sport quite seriously and proved to be a hard taskmaster. As a boy, Stevie was instructed to be as quiet as possible on a stream, but he refused to obey. He thought that was silly. “Trout can’t hear,” he protested. “I’ve seen ’em. They don’t have ears.” That night, while he was taking a bath, Dad burst in and ducked Stevie’s head under the water, then banged the side of the tub with his fist. The lad learned his lesson. Trout may not have ears, but they can sense vibrations.
Although I got a kick out of the story, I already knew that an angler should be stealthy. Alas, Stevie’s other tips also verged on the familiar — try to match the hatch, check the length of your leader, don’t “horse” a fish and risk breaking it off, and so on. Only one tip rang a bell, because it focused on a mistake I’d been making. It’s best to fish the close-in water first, Stevie advised, so you don’t cast over the trout and spook them. Lately, I’d been ignoring the holds along a bank and swinging for the fences instead, laying out too much line in an attempt to hit a distant target. Long casts aren’t always the answer, plus we’re usually more accurate with short ones. I made a mental note to remember that.
After Stevie’s blog, an Orvis website came up next. It featured a list of excellent how-to articles provided free of charge. I assumed the most compelling for my purposes would be “How to Become a Better Fly Fisher,” by Tom Rosenbauer, the very goal I had in mind. The author isn’t a purist, I learned. He urged readers to practice wherever they could. In the absence of a trout stream, why not try for largemouth bass? Two favorite spots of Rosenbauer’s are golf course and cemetery ponds, although he had to sneak in at times. I could probably manage fishing a pond on the Back Nine, I thought, but casting poppers among the tombstones at a cemetery might be a stretch.
Rosenbauer also suggested fishing drainage ditches. He used Woolly Buggers for — of all things — carp. If I’m not mistaken, there was a controversy about carp on the fly in this very journal years ago. I myself have had some experience of this form of angling. A friend in Sonoma once invited me to a neighbor’s farm pond to try for carp. The pond was small and ugly and smelled pretty bad, and the smell got worse as the temperature climbed into the 90s. Putting aside such petty concerns, I began casting a heavily weighted nymph and soon hooked a ridiculously
fat carp. It felt as if I’d hooked log. The monster didn’t so much fight as thrash and then roll over. I’ve never been happier to release a fish.
The rest of my online investigation yielded little of value until I clicked on the website of Field & Stream. The article in question was titled “Fly Fishing Made Easy,” a dubious claim, in my view. Almost nothing worthwhile in life is ever easy, as my mother used to say. (She never ducked my head under in the bath, thank goodness.) I read on anyway and found a couple of nuggets that applied to my struggle to improve. The first came from Kirk Deeter, who admonished me to “let bad casts go,” something I hadn’t been doing.
Say you notice a rising trout and cast to it, but a gust of wind blows your fly off course. The temptation is to retrieve it quickly, then cast again to the spot you were aiming for. Bad idea, says Deeter. He quotes Missouri River guide Pete Cardinal: “Let your fly float out of that trout’s range of vision, then go again — not before.” Patience, as ever, is a virtue.
Deeter’s other top tip confirmed what I’ve always believed. Most fly fishers invest too much time and money in flies. I used to cart around a box with more than a hundred. I owned variants of variants along with curiosities such as a fly tied to resemble a Pautzke’s Ball of Fire that I bought from a con man once in Yosemite. (The trout, of course, weren’t fooled.) According to Deeter, it’s best to simplify matters. Try carrying 10 basic flies and learn to fish each five different ways. He cites the Muddler Minnow as an example. It usually is fished as a sculpin or a baitfish, but if you grease the deer hair, then dead drift it on the surface or twitch it under a cut bank, it resembles a grasshopper. That concluded my search for advice online. The experiment confirmed what I would’ve guessed, that the Internet is a catch-all for so much information it takes a fair bit of effort to sift the wheat from the chaff. Even with a subject as harmless as fly fishing, you run into a certain amount of crackpot theorizing and self-styled experts who are probably less gifted with a rod than you are. In the future, I intend to skip the computer when I’m feeling stumped and go back to those angling classics on my shelves, to Bergman and Schwiebert and McClane and Brooks. Call me old-fashioned, but I still trust the printed word over the agglomeration of voices bouncing off each other in cyberspace.
In many ways, the best advice I’ve picked up over the years has come from my fellow anglers. I recall one of my first trips to Hat Creek when I was still fishing a cheap Fenwick and wearing only hip boots. I quickly fell into the trap of casting for distance, trying to reach a trout feeding near the opposite bank. After failing to do so a few times, I waded 10 feet into the stream, violating Stevie Munn’s advice about the close-in water. As I emerged, a guy who’d watched the sorry spectacle said to me, “Congratulations, buddy. You just walked through a half dozen rainbows.” He didn’t have to say anything more. I got the message.
Never again have I waded so foolishly. The tip I treasure most I received from my old pal Paul Deeds, a superb angler who took me under his wing when we met on the Russian River, both fishing for steelhead. Deeds was a great help to me, although he was every bit as stern as Stevie Munn’s father and might well have dunked me in the Russian if I’d been a little smaller and more manageable. We soon began making trips together, including one to the McCloud, where I distinguished myself by becoming so excited I rushed from pool to pool, tripped on a pine cone, and nearly broke my shinbone. As I hobbled into camp that evening, Deeds lit a cheroot and observed my new hobble with amusement. I knew he’d feel compelled to comment, and sure enough, he did. “The trout aren’t going anywhere, you know,” he said. I took his words to heart. If I’m on a stream and feel the adrenaline start to pump, I take a deep breath and repeat to myself, “The trout aren’t going anywhere.”
