Published July 1, 2000 12:00AM
Don’t be cowed by gear fetishists and country squires. Take our clean and commonsense advice on tools, technique, and cagey quarry, and launch your superfly into the fray.
Lighten Up: It’s the cast, stupid.
By Ian Frazier
Fishville: Ten fly-friendly towns on the banks of waters frothing with trout.
By Nate Hoogeveen
A Trout’s Innermost Desires: It’s all about finding his comfort zone, baby.
By Nick Lyons
The Only Fly You Need: Chernobyl Ant of Double Bunny, ma’am?
By Florence Williams
What Burns My Ass: Judge not, dry-fly snob, lest ye suffer the ire of my rod.
By Angus Cameron
Your Best Angles: Top guides’ tips for stalking paranoid fish.
By Kent Black and Nate Hoogeveen
A Manifesto for Ignorance: Ah, cluelessness! Or, just do it yourself.
By David James Duncan
Buy Right, Buy Once: The right stuff for schlepping, wading, spying.
By Chris Keyes
My Hero: The greatest angler I ever saw was full of surprises.
By Jack Handey
I’VE BEEN HERE 91 YEARS, fishing for 82 of them and fly-fishing for 67, and I still don’t fully understand the fishing Purist. Maybe it’s as simple as age, but Purists really burn my ass. You can always tell when you’ve come across one. On the surface, his manners will be impeccable, but his low opinion of you will show through every feature and word. He will be fishing a dry fly, in a tiny size. Sometimes such Purists fish nymphs (naturally a tiny nymph paired with an upstream cast and a dead drift), but they do so staying as close in method to dry-fly fishing as they can. Once—just once—I managed to corner a Purist on Michigan’s Au Sable River while I was fishing a number 14 nymph. Our Purist had mistaken me for a fellow dry-fly man; he’d noticed that I was fishing upstream and drifting my fly down-current on a loose line, as he was. “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you were fishing wet,” he said, enunciating “wet” as if he were using a four-letter word for human waste instead of a three-letter word of Anglish. Having tangled with his ilk before, I took on the role of elder ichthyologist. “Yes,” I admitted, “I sometimes fish right where the fish are, below the surface, where, as I’m sure you know, trout do about 80 percent of their feeding.” Then I added my kicker: “When the fishing becomes too easy, I give up the dry fly.”
Our Purist was shaken. He asked me, shamelessly, just which fly was my single dry fly—when I fished dry, that is. “Oh,” I answered, “it really doesn’t matter, but I fish a Light Cahill as much as any. I usually carry only a single pattern, whatever my choice for the day.”
A single pattern? Trust me, it’s enough to rattle even the purest of the Pure.
Thinking Like a Coon
Harry Murray, owner of Murray's Fly Shop in Edinburg, Virginia, reckons that raccoons take more brook trout from the dainty Shenandoah streams than anglers do. Why? Because they're sneaky. “My son Jeff taught a fella to sneak,” says Murray, “and he took 25 or 30 fish his first day.” It might feel goofy, but crawling around the banks on your knees, hiding behind trees, and using the river's steep gradients to remain concealed can ensure a stocked creel.
High-Stick Nymphing
On the gin-clear flows of Tennessee's Chattahoochee, Unicoi Outfitters owner Jimmy Harris rarely makes a single backcast in the tighter sections. Harris recommends high-sticking. Slink up to within 15 feet downstream of your prey and use a roll cast to flip a nymph in front of the trout. Then hold your rod straight up in the air so that only your leader touches the water as the nymph drifts through the hole. Repeat as many times as the fish will allow.
Swinging the Fly
To hook a steelhead with a wet fly, provoke his ire, advises
Wilfred Lee, a guide with more than 40 years of experience around Hazelton, British Columbia.Cast 30 degrees downstream, then strip line and mend it out, letting the fly drop. When it passes through prime holding water, let the line tighten so that the fly swings hook eye forward in front of the fish as if it's fleeing—a movement that causes nearby steelhead to strike with reckless furor.
Double Hauling
To make long casts even into strong headwinds, start by laying out 30 to 40 feet of line. As you begin your backcast, grab hold of the line with your opposite hand, leaving at least ten feet of excess hanging off the reel. As the rod tip reaches 12 o'clock, pull down and up quickly on the line to increase line speed in your backcast. Then, as you start your forward cast, pull down and let go as the line shoots out. With practice you should be able to hit 60 to 75 feet.
Snake Casting
Perfect fly presentation is often ruined by drag—the current's unnatural tug on your fly as it drifts downstream—a problem the snake cast eliminates. To execute: Just as the line straightens out before you on a forward cast, wiggle the rod tip several times so that the line lies down in a series of S-curves on the water. Your fly will drift drag-free to your rising target while the current is busy taking the slack out of your line.
