In “The Fly Box, Part 2,” in the September/October 2018 issue of California Fly Fisher, Michael Checchio states emphatically that he is a “presentationist,” believing strongly that presentation is more important than the size and color of a fly. Later in his angling life, he has cut down his trout fly selection to a half dozen patterns, in part due to wanting less clutter and in part because he spends more angling time chasing steelhead, where pattern selection is often less critical.
I admire him for having the discipline to do this, and I still make an attempt every year to cull my flies and consolidate fly box contents, because patterns I haven’t used in years or haven’t ever caught a fish on seem to creep back into their slots or compartments. But it is a Sisyphean effort. California, Nevada, Southern Oregon, and Mexico are my primary fishing grounds. Just in California, the diverse geography, multiple mountain ranges, huge river systems connected to a vast Delta, freestone rivers, spring creeks, voluminous reservoirs, and challenging tailwaters, as well as 1,100 miles of Pacific Ocean coastline, give anglers here a huge number of fly-fishing opportunities. And that means that you may limit your catch, instead of catching your limit, but it’s hard to limit the number and diversity of the fly patterns you carry all the time.
On the lower Yuba, near my home, I would bet a large sum or a dinner and a brew at Scallywag’s, up from the river, that a Humpy or Adams, however well presented, won’t have much of a chance of being eaten in a PMD hatch, when f ish switch their preference back and forth between size 16 and size 14 duns and emergers, not to mention between different abdomen colors. (Locals carry multiples of a PMD variant they call the Pinkie.)
The same pickiness is seen in Callibaetis, midge, and damselfly stillwater patterns, because size, color, form, and flies tied for specific lake habitat, make a difference between success and failure. Of course, presentation also is important. Do you target and cast to a lake fish so your fly lands where it will be seen by a cruising fish before leader and line? Do you kneel to lower your profile? Do you lay out your line so the fly turns over and is presented on a straightened leader or lands with coils of leader next to the fly? Do you put leader sinkant or clay on the last foot of your tippet? Can you get that fly out 60 feet to less cautious fish? The best anglers use every trick they know. They are presentationists, but they also carry a lot of different flies tied, tweaked, and refined for the many different venues and situations that they know they will encounter.
So whatever you do to simplify your fly selection, and however successful you may be at reducing what you carry to an elegant few patterns, the success is only temporary. Visits to familiar venues necessitate additions of old favorites once excluded, and visits to new waters prompt the inclusion of new patterns.
I travel to Sinaloa Province in Mexico every January to fly fish for bass at Lake El Salto and Lake Picachos, and bass season in my local lower-elevation lakes starts soon after, particularly with the adaptation of float-n-fly trout tactics that I ply for winter bass and panfish angling, using large and small Balance Minnow patterns under indicators. I always try to get my bass and stillwater fly boxes cleaned up before I head south of the border, but the vacated space gets filled quickly, because I always have new bugs to test. The total number of artificials I carry doesn’t seem to drop appreciably. In fact, the number seems to increase each year, regardless of my best intentions.
And then there’s the question of organization itself. What goes where? A few years ago, I set my mind to organizing my fly gear, particularly fly boxes, as well as lines, and reels. A goal was to reduce the number of flies and fly boxes I have and carry. I was returning from fishing the Carson and stopped at antique shops in Minden and Gardnerville, looking for a suitable piece of furniture to support my organizational efforts. I found a reasonably priced cabinet with glass on three sides and four glass shelves. I wanted glass so I could see what I had at a glance.
After cleaning and oiling the cabinet, polishing the glass, culling nonperforming flies, standardizing, and loading and labeling the fly boxes with erasable marker pens, I felt somewhat organized. I could select and stow what I might need, whether preparing for a trout trip to the Yuba, stillwater fishing at Davis or Frenchmans, or bass fishing in Mexico. I tried to have exclusive caddis boxes, nymph boxes, stonefly boxes, large dryfly boxes, small dry-fly boxes, and so on, but flies that defied categorization kept popping up. For example, do you include bass bugs in the terrestrial category? And should your collection of bass bugs include mouse, lemming, and small bird imitations? They live on land, so are these “terrestrials?” Additionally, there were flies with which I had enjoyed success. If you are a romantic like me, those flies had stories of their own, they brought back memories, and I couldn’t bring myself to toss them.
And then, gradually, my organizational structure collapsed. Flies were returned to the wrong compartments or boxes when I got excited, or they just got tossed into my gear bag. And boxes got misplaced. On a June trip to the Fall River and on to spring-creek fishing at the head of the Williamson, then stillwater fly fishing in Central Oregon, I couldn’t find most of my terrestrial imitations. I had an ant, termite, and beetle box, but most of my terrestrials were tucked here and there elsewhere, all over the place. In the discombobulation of a late evening, low-light feeding frenzy, I couldn’t find the fly that I wanted.
Nevertheless, every year, I still make the effort to simply and organize my flies so that I can efficiently find what I need while fishing. I like to work on my boxes and fly wallets during the numerous commercial breaks in three-and-a-half-hour-long football games. I have timed these breaks to be as much as five minutes and can make significant culling progress if Cal or Stanford is playing on Saturday or the Forty Niners and Raiders are playing on Sunday. It’s complicated, since Aaron Rodgers and Jarod Goff are Cal men and are with the Rams and Packers, respectively, and I have to check in on them periodically. But it’s not as complicated as the effort to simplify my fly boxes. I’ve learned that’s a process I’ll have to do over and over again. As F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote at the end of The Great Gatsby, “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
