Three to eight inches above the hook. (Four inches, I found out later, is the maximum legal distance.) Attach your favorite indicator. Add weight as appropriate to fishing conditions.
“What is that?” quoth I, upon first spotting this on a fellow traveler’s line. In my innocence — call me the Candide of the Klondike — I presumed what I was looking at was some kind of preliminary rig that would now be finished off in some interesting way.
“Pegged egg,” he said.
“Huh. So . . . what’s it for?”
“Dollies, mostly. I guess you can use it for other fish.”
“So . . . the bead’s, like, an attractor? But what’s with the bare hook? What do you tie on for a fly?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
I wasn’t getting this. “No. This is all there is to it — a pegged egg. I don’t know why it works, but the guide said it would, and so far I’ve been catching the hell out of them.”
A guide proposed this? More like some kind of felon.
I searched the expert out. “Oh yeah. Everybody’s using them up here, and that’s a good thing. See, problem with Dollies especially is they take eggs so deep they get gut-hooked a lot, torn up, even when the hook’s barbless. That almost never happens with pegged beads. Fish grabs, you pull, and the dangling hook takes them either at the side of the mouth or on the outside of the head. Always.”
Madre . . . He shifted uncomfortably. “Maybe. Technically. But it’s better for the fish, for sure. And they are going after the bead.”
Which, as flies go, isn’t really one. Whoa. Symbolic beads of sweat stood out from my real forehead.
I reeled . . . in. While almost everybody in our party ended up pegging, when it was plain the cohos would never arrive, I held out for three days, tried it for an hour, then went back to working a tiny egg-sucking bugger. (And never you mind that the red bugger head was brass underneath. (“Waitress? Can we get some peanuts over here? I’m plumb famished after that sermon….”) So it wasn’t a judgment, honest. It just didn’t feel right, but it did prompt a whole lot of puzzling, mostly focused on what seemed like large implications.
How many “rules” did this rig and technique break, anyway? I mean the ones in play when I began the game? First: Catch-and-release angling was so rare in the 1960s that I’d met only one fellow who said he practiced it at all. Unless a caught fish was too small or a “trash” species, its proper place was in your belly or, too often, buried in a neighbor’s freezer, burning yellow. Fishing was sport and entertainment, yes, but an activity with Purpose, certainly not an activity for those too feeble to administer the coup de grace.
Besides, if you didn’t bring it home, how would anybody know you’d caught anything?
Second: Even if catch-and-release angling had been the rule, Dolly Vardens — in those days, also known as bull trout — would still have been routinely beaten to death and left to rot.
Everybody knew they were one of the reasons steelhead and salmon runs kept declining — never mind that the species had coexisted for an age or two — so responsible anglers bonked them and, usually, left their carcasses for raccoons.
For more about this in California, check into a history of the McCloud River.
Third: Flies were fur and feathers and hair. Shreds of tinsel were OK, and kids could use cheap balsa poppers for panfish.
Plastic? Foam? These were . . .
“Put it like this: If it was me fishing? I wouldn’t skate.”
What he would do, however, was set up his clients with high-density sink-tips or heads, then instruct them to cover water as methodically as anthropology interns excavating graves.
“But it would be good to have somebody do something different, if anybody wants to.” I did.
I really did. In Alaska, I’d stripped when others pegged.
On this river, for the next several days — not counting a few hours when I practiced fishing a riffle hitch dry — I nymphed while others swung.
Not your typical nymphing, perhaps, given the length of casts and the need for complicated mends, but basically I did what my Alaska pals had done a month before, save this: I fished with flies — or what now passes for them, if beadheads do — including the same little streamer that took Dollies in the smaller coastal streams of Prince of Wales Island, barbered slightly to mimic the Rare Red-Headed Stonefly .
. . or whatever. It caught a steelhead, too, just two hours into our first morning of wade fishing — a blind-pig-finds-an-acorn sort of thing that happened to follow quickly after I switched from the flies that the guide had offered me.
It caught another after lunch — actually, on another fly much like the first one — and at that point I wondered if the guide would suggest my companions adapt their tactics to mine, since none of the other five fishers in the outfitter’s two parties had yet touched a steelhead while fishing swings.
As in 35 hours without a strike. Instead, he suggested that I change. What? “Why would I do that?”
He shrugged. “I just thought you might want to.” I could see one decent reason for that: to help him save face.
But then, why would he need to do so, unless he thought it necessary to continue promoting the traditional tactic over what’s now a 30-year-old “modern” approach, nymphing?
And what about pushing this riffle hitch, more modern still? But . . . switch to fishing dry?
As in not heretical . . . say: “Bass may or may not be fine, but they sure as hell are not the beautiful trout and chars I grew fishing for, and they don’t belong in the waters where they’re pushing out the natives I love.”
That’s probably it. On the other hand, that reference to “bonefish every winter”?
I smell a class issue here a tad too similar to the one Schullery skewers. You think?
Consider this: Eight or nine years ago, this very magazine put a carp on its cover — possibly the first time any fly fishing publication ever did so, at least in this country.
I heard rumors that some stores wouldn’t display the issue.
There are some good reasons for that, given carps’ effect on the environments they invade. I’m sympathetic.
But there are also reasons not so noble. Some of you know them, and you know who you are.
Suffice it to say there’s an ethnic group long ago associated with carp in this country, associated closely enough that an epithet even describes, foully if not specifically, how they fished for carp . . .
