All Fishermen Are Liars (16 page)

Still later, as evening came on, we’d switch to heavier rods and fish streamers, slapping them as far up under the overhanging willows as possible and stripping them out so fast we got rope burns on our fingers from the lines. You could think a slower retrieve would give the fish an easier shot at the fly, but in fact the sight of fleeing prey triggers strikes and it’s not humanly possible to strip a fly so fast that a trout that wants it can’t catch it. Or as a friend says of streamer fishing, “When in doubt, rip it out.”

Neither the Big Hole nor the Beaverhead was unusually crowded, but with the rivers finally low and clear there were lots of fishermen around, busily coming and going in bars and fly shops and rumbling up and down the back roads towing all manner of drift boats,
including a homemade plywood number outside of Twin Bridges that looked like a coffin with oarlocks.

It was the usual mix of western river personnel. There were trout bums sleeping in vans and referring to the Beaverhead as “the Beave,” family men on vacation, working stiffs with more tools than tackle in the beds of their pickups, natty sports with pressed shirts and blocked felt hats and the odd bond trader with a trophy wife: one of those women who, like some house cats, make it by being decorative but don’t catch many mice.

One evening when we came in, we told the lodge owner we wanted to fish till dark the next day—missing dinner at the lodge—and then buy the guides burgers and a few beers afterward. (We’d already cleared this with the guides and they were all for it.) But the owner said no, the guides worked for him and he insisted on having all his people back at seven-thirty for supper. “His people.” The guides were looking down, apparently studying the gravel they were standing on. The rest of us glanced at each other, wondering if this was worth throwing a hissy fit over and deciding it wasn’t.

Back home in Colorado the season petered out gradually. Some rivers did finally come down, and as often happens in high-water years, the trout were well fed and rested and the fishing was glorious for the few weeks it lasted, with the days short and cool; the cottonwoods, willows and dogwoods in fall colors; and the sky filled with Canada geese. It was the full enchilada.

Other streams, especially the small creeks up in the high country, never warmed up enough for the hatches to come off and were still in the last stages of runoff when the nights turned cold enough for the first frosts. It was possible to nymph up a trout or two to prove a point, but for the first time in thirty-five years, there was no dry-fly season at all on my favorite no-longer-quite-so-secret mountain stream.

Tom finally landed a job on the Gulf Coast of Florida. It wasn’t
exactly what he was hoping for and he wasn’t happy about moving so far away from trout fishing, but it was paying work, so he took it anyway. He left right ahead of the first big snowstorm in late October and drove south into Texas before turning east, hoping to keep his bald tires on dry roads. I was worried about him, but he managed to get his old car through seven states without breaking down or having the police stop him to ask about the mismatched license plates. He called when he got there to say that he’d never fished salt water before, but was eager to try it.

16

THE NUCLEAR OPTION

The other day I showed some steelhead flies I’d tied and that I was cautiously proud of to a friend from Washington State. He said, “These are no good.” Susan, who can sometimes be sweetly naïve, gave me a knowing look. She now understands that this kind of gruff irony is what passes as a compliment among some men, although she may never understand why.

These were the kind of fancy patterns that some steelheaders swear by and that others say are pretty enough to look at but aren’t
necessary. There were some Spey variations of Dan Callahan’s original Green Butt Skunk and some Skagit Mists—a Dec Hogan pattern adapted for steelhead from a century-old Atlantic salmon fly called a White-Winged Akroyd.

Every fly tier will understand what I mean by “cautiously proud.” These were complicated patterns complete with tags, tails, butts, joints, mixed blue-eared pheasant and gadwall hackle, goose shoulder wings and jungle cock sides. I’d worked slowly and carefully, had gotten all the parts in the right places and proper proportions and had managed not to crowd the heads, all of which amounts to a good start. The flies looked okay and would fish well enough, but in terms of the sheer elegance that’s achieved by some tiers, they were still a few degrees off plumb. The very best of these classic-style steelhead flies aren’t just beautiful; they also seem thoughtlessly organic, as if the entire fly has just unfolded from the small, lacquered head the way a flower sprouts from a bud.

I tied flies for trout for over thirty years before I started fooling around with steelhead patterns, and the idea of tying patterns for fish that weren’t eating stumped me at first. This is the kind of unsolvable puzzle that, like religion, causes some to settle on a comforting homeliness and turns others into flaming visionaries, each according to his own nature.

That would explain why one experienced steelheader carries elegant, feather-winged wet flies dripping with golden pheasant, ostrich and jungle cock and the next has a box full of unadorned marabou powder puffs. The natural exuberance of fly tiers explains why there are so many patterns to choose from, including those brainstorms a guide friend calls “three-beer flies.” If the tier happens to have the TV on in the background at the moment of creation, these things can end up looking like the radioactive octopus from a late night horror movie.

In fact, there’s a convincing argument in steelheading that it’s
all about presentation and that beyond basic considerations of large or small and bright or dark, fly pattern hardly matters. This leads some tiers to say that since pattern doesn’t matter, you might as well just lash some rabbit fur to a hook and be done with it. Others conclude, with equal conviction, that since pattern doesn’t matter, you might as well get a pile of exotic feathers and knock yourself out. It comes down to personality. To a certain kind of tier, letting go of any amount of beauty in the interest of practicality is agonizing, while to another practicality
is
beauty. I’ve learned to decisively keep a foot in each camp based on a comment by novelist and steelhead fisherman Thomas McGuane. He agreed that it probably
is
all about presentation, but added, “The trouble is, you can’t properly present something you don’t believe in.”

So maybe the right fly is the one that not only fools a fish every now and then, but also fools the fisherman into keeping it in the water long enough for that to happen—if not actually believing in every cast and swing, then at least not becoming despondent. Think of it as the angling equivalent of the placebo effect. My friend Scott Sadil said, “If you’re changing flies while steelheading, you’re in a slump.” Someone else once said, “The most important thing in steelhead fishing is confidence—I think.”

This business of presentation versus pattern is the longest-running argument in fly-fishing. It will never be settled because for every day when it seems to be all about presentation, there’s another day when it seems to be all about presentation
of the right fly
. Of course trout fishing has the advantage of being somewhat empirical. All things being equal, a trout fly that’s drifted properly through the right water for an hour without a strike begins to look like the wrong fly for that time and place. Steelheading is more faith-based. A steelhead fly that you’ve fished for three days without a pull could still turn out to be the right one.

And then there’s the idea of the comeback fly, one of the most
arcane concepts in steelheading. This is the term of art for the fly you change to when a fish has swirled at or halfheartedly bumped the fly you’re fishing, indicating that he might be willing to play, but not with that pattern. For most the comeback fly is something smaller, darker and sparser than whatever they were fishing—sometimes so sparse it’s just a little wisp of a thing that looks as if it had been left unfinished. For some fishermen the comeback fly is always different, determined by whatever they were fishing that brought up the player in the first place. For others it’s a specific pattern, maybe tied in a couple of sizes to reflect conditions.

I once asked a steelheader in Oregon, “If your comeback fly is so effective, why not just fish it all the time?”

He explained that the bigger, flashier fly would attract the attention of more fish and even hook some of them, while the comeback fly was reserved for the tough customers. “It’s the steak and potatoes that gets him in the door,” he said, “but it’s that little piece of cheesecake that closes the deal.”

Since I started steelheading, I’ve managed to fill three boxes with flies: an odd assortment of this and that pattern as I became aware of them through guides and friends. I’ve fished some of them and have actually caught steelhead on a precious few. (Among the ones that worked are some patterns I didn’t especially like at first, but then nothing makes a goofy fly look beautiful like catching a fish on it.) I’ve also picked up a little knowledge of the sport along the way, including the inescapable fact that three boxes crammed with steelhead flies is the mark of an amateur.

Most of the experienced steelheaders I’ve met carry a single, small box containing what seems like a meager selection of flies. There was a young guide on the Deschutes River who had a few neat rows of flawlessly tied classic wets, any one of which could have been framed and hung convincingly on the wall. When I complimented him on his tying, he shrugged and said he didn’t know if it made a
difference or not but “there’s just something about showing the fish your best effort.” There was also a well-known steelheader on the North Umpqua who, on that particular day, had exactly seven flies in his box, all wildly mismatched and all looking like they’d been retrieved from bankside branches or submerged rocks, as I suspect they had.

Granted, these guys’ boxes might have looked different in another season with changes in water temperature, depth and clarity (steelhead flies tend to get bigger and darker as the rivers do the same), but the message was still clear: Get some flies you like, stay faithful to them and work on your casting.

One of the things that drew me to the elaborate, full-dress steelhead patterns is their contrast with the drab, practical trout flies I usually tie. Even some of the simplest steelhead hair-wings have a few fussy little architectural touches because anadromous fish are thought to be suckers for visual complexity. And if a little bit of gingerbread works, why not go the full distance with flying buttresses and blind arches? This is sometimes referred to as the Fallacy of Wishful Thinking, but knowing what it’s called doesn’t mean you can’t fall victim to it. I’ve always liked flies that are plain and workmanlike, but it seems encoded in the human condition that as soon as you achieve simplicity in one area of life, you’re likely to go all Victorian in another.

This is the impulse that causes some tiers to build those lovely and possibly pointless full-dress Atlantic salmon flies: the ones that will see the light of day only from a shadow-box frame and that will never, ever get wet. I tried my hand at some of these once as an exercise in something or other, but didn’t get very far. I tended to overdress the flies—forgetting back at the tag, tail and butt that there were seven more operations to go before I started on the wing. And then my married wings themselves—not unlike some of my friends—wouldn’t
stay
married for reasons that were never clear.

It’s possible that I just wasn’t a good-enough tier, but I think the real reason was a lack of immediacy. I manage to freeload myself into decent Atlantic salmon fishing only once a decade on average, and when I do go, I use the simpler, hair-winged flies that are now standard. In other words, when there isn’t a fish somewhere in the deal, I lose interest.

I overdressed my steelhead flies at first, too, even though I knew they were supposed to be sparse. (A friend said of my first batch, “They’re nice enough, but don’t quit your day job.”) Even the simplest hair-wing, like a Purple Peril, can get clunky in the wrong hands and the potential gets greater as patterns get more complex. When you sit down to tie something like a Skagit Mist, the question becomes, how do you tie a fly with eleven separate materials and fourteen distinct anatomical parts that still has the requisite air and light that a painter would call “negative space”? Turns out you do it with a sharp eye toward proportion and a sense that everything needs room to breathe.

Aside from the aesthetic prescription, there are also some engineering considerations. For instance, the long, dangly heron substitute hackle on a spey pattern should be tied sparsely because steelhead are said to like it that way, but also because too much hackle underneath counterbalanced only by that skinny, low-set wing on top can cause the fly to roll on its side in the current, ruining the silhouette. Which begs the question, Do steelhead really prefer sparsely tied spey flies, or are the sparsely tied flies the only ones they get a decent look at?

And don’t even get me started on hooks. Even if you stick with the traditional japanned black, up-eye salmon hooks, there are too many choices. I lean toward the Alec Jackson spey hook because it holds well, makes a graceful fly and its medium wire nicely splits the difference. But then there are days when you want a fly to wake or skate on the surface and other days when you want it to all but plow
gravel on the swing. Naturally, there’s a selection of specialized hooks for each purpose and they can cost as much as a dollar each.

It took me the better part of three decades to pare my core trout-fly selection down to a generous handful of mostly simple, straightforward patterns. I’m thinking that having learned that lesson once; it won’t take me nearly as long with steelhead flies. On the other hand, there are certain phases you have to go through—like puberty—so you might as well get on with it.

Once you tumble for the fancy steelhead flies in the picture books, you’re sunk. Even as you tell yourself you can just admire them from afar like works of art, you know in your heart that you’ll eventually have to tie some and fish them as part of your ongoing education. If you’re like me, you’ll envy those who can tie on a steelhead fly with the offhanded confidence of a DEA agent slapping a fresh clip into his 9-millimeter while you dither over the black one, the purple one or that pretty little orange one. You’ll develop your own preferences eventually, but you also have your pride as a tier and don’t want to limit yourself to flies you’re not afraid to tie.

There’s also the single drawback to being a fly tier, which is that you like to tie flies and can find it hard to stop. I fish enough to burn through my favorite trout patterns at a pretty good clip, but unless you’re a complete klutz—and we all have our moments—you just don’t lose a lot of steelhead flies, so they can begin to pile up. Eventually you may have to reconcile the flies you want to tie with the ones you actually need to catch fish.

In an attempt to imitate those who know what they’re doing (not a bad fishing strategy, by the way), I now limit myself to a single fly box on the river. It’s a big old Wheatley salmon box with a swing leaf and 110 clips, but it’s still just the one box—and no one has to know how many flies I have stashed in my luggage.

It’s become my secret ambition to someday design a steelhead fly that’s so effective I can call it the Nuclear Option, but so far I’ve
mostly stuck with established patterns. There’s no science that I can see behind steelhead flies—or if there is, it’s the kind of science that would have felt at home in the Dark Ages—but I’m hoping there’s a kind of alchemy in operation that you don’t have to understand in order to copy. It’s also easier this way. When you start trying to invent patterns, it’s possible to spend a pleasant evening tying steelhead flies, only to wake up screaming in the middle of the night at the thought that you should have veiled your blue-eared pheasant hackle with orange-dyed mallard instead of natural.

Confidence in your fly pattern really is important in steelheading, and you take confidence where you find it. If a guide or local hotshot points at a fly in your box and says, “Try that,” or, better yet, gives you a fly of his own, you’d be a fool not to fish it. Failing that, you glance at the river, open your fly box and wait for inspiration. The right fly will be like a Tibetan prayer flag to those of us who are not practicing Buddhists. It may or may not bring good fortune as promised, but it can’t hurt and it looks real pretty.