All Fishermen Are Liars (7 page)

The fishing that day was never fast and furious, but it never slowed to what you could call a lull. The trout weren’t exactly easy to catch, but for the most part they were right where you’d expect them to be and only a few presented the kind of puzzle that an adequate fly caster who’s on his game couldn’t solve. I never hooked another fish as big as that first one, but a few were in that same over-fifteen-inch class that can seem so big on small water.

There were no surprises, but somehow everything was a surprise: how the trout fit the water the way birds fit the air and how they’re so hard to spot in the stream, but so ornately beautiful in the hand. I know their coloration is a practical matter of camouflage with a seasonal nod to mating, but there seems to be something else in operation here: something frisky that has made these fish prettier than they’d have to be just to get by. It’s fishing new water that lets me see all this again as if for the first time.

7

RODS

I got a rambling letter from a friend the other day talking about fly rods.
His
fly rods, that is, past and present: what they were, where they came from, where some of them eventually went (in recent years he’s given some away to guides) and what he liked or didn’t like about them. It was the kind of letter you write to a friend who shares your interest and who you don’t have to impress—basically a two-page, stream-of-consciousness postscript.

There were surprisingly few rods considering that this man is a
retired doctor in his late eighties and a lifelong fly fisher, but then not all of us are tackle freaks. I
am
a tackle freak, although after years of accumulating rods I’ve come to envy those who fish comfortably with what they have instead of always looking for something better. Marksmen like to say, “Beware of the man with only one gun because he knows how to use it.”

The search for the perfect rod begins early in a life of fly fishing and often for the wrong reason. As a beginner, you’re a poor caster and you naturally want to get better. In a commercial culture like ours, that suggests a better rod, which you are led to believe is a rod that costs more than the one you have. I mean, if one rod sells for $129.95 and another of the same material, length and line weight sets you back $700, why the difference in price if the expensive one isn’t better? This is one of the burning philosophical questions of our time.

In fact, what you probably need are casting lessons, regular practice and, most of all, lots of fishing, since casting on water with fish in it is different from casting on a lawn, for reasons having to do with both physics and psychology. Also, there are things you’ll learn on your own through constant exposure that no one could ever teach you.

But then in some rare cases, the rod you start with really
is
a clunker that holds you back. Maybe, as in my case, you bought it at a yard sale for a few dollars because that was all you could afford at the time. Before you handed over the money, you put the rod together and wiggled it as you’d seen others do, but that was just for show. You didn’t know the first thing about fly rods, but you had the itch and had to start somewhere.

My first fly rod was a 7
½
-foot, four-piece fiberglass fly-spin combo with a reversible reel seat. Two rods for the price of one: What a deal! I wasn’t much more than a kid at the time, but I still should have known that a tool that’s supposed to do two separate jobs wouldn’t do either of them very well. I did manage to catch some fish on this thing, but a kindly stranger who stopped one day to give me some
much-needed casting tips ended the brief session by saying, “And when you get a few bucks running uphill, you really oughta get yourself a better rod.” He was just trying to be helpful and he was right, but the idea that a new rod could improve my casting took root and ruined me for life. The obvious danger is that a fly rod—especially an expensive one—can be seen as a talisman with some inherent power of its own, while in practice it’s more likely to be like a Stradivarius violin in the hands of someone who doesn’t play well: a flawless instrument that nonetheless squawks like a chicken.

I did eventually get a rod that was better (almost anything would have been) and it proved to be the first of many. At that time I could have done virtually all my trout fishing with the 8-foot 5-weight Granger Victory I picked up for $50, but many of the fishing writers I was reading left the impression that doing all your fishing with one all-around rod was like performing brain surgery with a can opener. So I came to think I needed shorter 4- and 5-weights, longer 5- and 6-weights, 7-weight streamer rods, 8-weight bass rods, 9-weight salmon rods and so on, not to mention the reels and lines to go with them. Later, when I started traveling a lot, I backed up my two-piece rods with three-piece models that I could carry on airplanes. Then I gradually accumulated spares in case I broke one.

I developed the usual nit-picking preferences. I think a rod should be as long as possible for leverage and line mending and as short as it has to be for convenience. On my small home water, an 8
½
- or 9-foot rod is best for line control, but it’s too long to cast in tight quarters or even to carry from pool to pool through thick woods. A 6
½-
or 7-foot rod is about the right length for casting but doesn’t give you enough reach and leaves too much line on the water. Obviously the ideal rod for mountain creeks is 7 feet, 9 inches. That must be why I have four rods of that odd length: three 5-weights and a 4-weight.

My first good rods were all used split bamboo by defunct makers,
but don’t ask me why all these years later. It must have had something to do with my ideas about tradition, craftsmanship, romance and the dubious value of practicality in sport, not to mention the sense that we’re too quick to leave the best we have behind us and call it progress. It was also a sign of the times when graphite was new, fiberglass was fading and bamboo was still a viable choice rather than a social statement.

Martin Keane hadn’t yet published
Classic Rods and Rodmakers
, which started a price war on old bamboo that continued unevenly until the crash of 2008. It also helped that the Granger and Phillipson companies had been headquartered just down the road in Denver, and half the attics and garages in Colorado contained old bamboo rods that regularly turned up at yard sales with price tags in the $30-to-$50 range. That meant a working stiff could get his hands on them and still pay the rent, although sometimes just barely.

During that same period I just managed to afford a few longer Paynes (the shorter, lighter rods were already out of my reach), and as prices for the big-name makers went through the roof, I rightly guessed that F. E. Thomas rods would soon be sucked into the vacuum. I picked up two of them for a song: an 8-foot 4-weight and a 7
½
-foot 5-weight. Some of those rods would turn out to be the only good investments I ever made, and also hinted at the dark side of bamboo: Even those of us who claim not to care what they’re worth can’t help but be aware of their value and in weak moments can come off sounding like stockbrokers with hot tips.

At one point I even published a monograph on bamboo rods without realizing that this little book would mark me for life as a true believer. Some years later on a river in northern Canada, I met a man who said he was shocked to see me fishing a graphite rod. Shocked!

We’re all children of our times. Bamboo spoke to me then and still does now, but if I took up fly fishing today, there’s a good chance I’d put these rods in the same category with cherry 1957 Chevys
driven by older guys for reasons that aren’t immediately evident. It boils down to this: If you’re young now and your fly-fishing career lasts as long as you hope it will, eventually someone will point at your graphite rod and say, “You still fishin’ that old thing?”

But I was never really a purist and so I cautiously tumbled for graphite when it first came out. Through a fly shop where I worked, I got a screaming deal on some J. Kennedy Fisher graphite blanks and built myself a 9-foot 5-weight and a 10-foot 6-weight. I fished the 9-footer off and on for years. I liked it, but I didn’t love it and finally gave it to an old friend who was moving to Alaska and needed a grayling rod. The 10-footer never quite worked out. Like most of the 10-foot rods I’ve cast, it had no real reason to be longer than 9 feet, and it was a two-piece blank, so the 5-foot-long case was unwieldy. I still have it. I’ve tried to trade it off a few times, but no one wants it.

Through the same shop I got one of the first Sage graphite rods at cost. I think it was an 8-foot 6-weight. I remember it as having a softer, more elegant action than most graphites, which at the time were all about “speed” and “power” as if they were fly fishing’s answer to muscle cars. Like most graphite rods, it was soon made obsolete by newer models, although I’m told that in certain circles those original Sage graphites are now considered modern classics. I traded that rod, but I wouldn’t mind having it back now. I can’t remember what I got for it, but I’d learned by then that once you put money into tackle it was best to leave it in tackle. That way you’d always have something new to play with, while cash would just slip through your fingers and be gone forever.

More recently I was given a sublime graphite rod by a filmmaker I did a small favor for. It’s a 9-foot 5/6-weight that’s smooth, powerful, effortless and elegant. When I asked him what it was, he said it was just something he put together with blanks and hardware he had lying around the shop. This is one of the best graphite rods I’ve ever cast and I have no idea what it is. Better not break it.

To this day most of the rods I like and use are bamboo and only a few are graphite, although the graphites are gradually accumulating. Of those, most are longer rods for heavier lines—including spey rods—where I think the lighter material really shines. But that’s because I came to graphite after I already had a stack of favorite bamboo rods that, for reasons of habit, sentiment or stubbornness, I wasn’t about to give up. In any event, I came to understand that it doesn’t matter what a fly rod is made of. What matters is how it works. It also doesn’t matter if your hammer has an old-timey wood or newfangled fiberglass handle; what matters is balance and weight, which is a matter of personal preference informed by the job at hand. A light hammer is easier to swing all day, but a heavy hammer takes fewer swings and less muscle to drive a nail.

As for rod materials, I once asked the great fly caster Lefty Kreh if the then-new boron rods really cast better than graphite, as their makers claimed. He said that the best of them did, but added that the improvement was maybe 3 or 4 percent at the top end of their performance, while there probably weren’t a hundred casters in the country who could get more than 50 percent of the potential out of a fly rod. So there you have it.

Most fly rods cast as well as they’ll ever cast—whether it’s good, bad or indifferent—with the line weight the manufacturer recommends, or at least something very close to it. Maybe a weight-forward 5 instead of a double-taper 4. But then, other rods seem so mismatched that you wonder if the line designation was a mistake. I have an 8
½
-foot graphite that sold years ago as a 2-weight, but that won’t load at normal casting ranges with anything lighter than a double-taper 4. The silver lining there is, it’s a really nice 4-weight and out here in the Rocky Mountains I don’t see much use for a 2-weight anyway.

Some rod experts say that a good rod will cast a wide variety of line sizes. I think what they mean is that it can be
made
to cast with
some effort, but every rod I’ve ever liked had a sweet spot that could only be satisfied by a very specific line size. This kind of fine-tuning may approach a universal truth about all tools. An old woodcutter once told me it didn’t matter what kind of chain saw you used, but “if your chain ain’t sharpened right, your kerf goes all cattywampus.”

There
is
a difference between fly lines from different manufacturers, although not always as much as their claims might lead you to think. I spent a long time trying out all the fly lines I could get my hands on and then finally settled on a single make of line I liked and that I now use for almost all my fishing. (Coincidentally, it’s the only line I know of that hasn’t changed since the early 1970s, except that it now comes in a fancy plastic box. They’ve added “Classic” to the name and of course it costs more.) It’s possible that I’m missing something, but this combination of habit and brand loyalty eliminates unpleasant surprises and keeps life a little simpler.

I think we each eventually settle on a handful of line weights that mirror the fishing we do and that strike some ergonomic chord. I instinctively want a 5-weight for most of my local trout fishing—it just feels right—although the length of the rod can vary from 7
½
to 9 feet, depending on the water. I have a few 4-weights I also really like, but I feel that anything lighter is either impractical or a gimmick. For a heavier rod I prefer a 9-foot 8-weight, and I have some real sweethearts, including a Payne bamboo and a Loop graphite. Many good casters prefer a 7-weight and have no use for an 8, but 7-weights strike me as too much for some purposes and not enough for others. A good 6-weight, on the other hand, is like a souped-up 5-weight for larger fish, wider rivers and bigger flies. Or is all that just an excuse to have a whole bunch of fly rods?

For Spey rods I like the versatility of a 13- or 14-foot 9-weight. Lighter, shorter two-handed rods are in fashion now, but you can fish a 9-weight anywhere, including situations that involve big water, big fish and flies the size of squirrels. I went through several Spey rods
before I settled on a pair of 9-weights that I like: one 13
½
-feet, the other 14. It would be nice if I could leave it at that, but although I own enough rods to build a picket fence around my property, I can sometimes be convinced that I need
just one more
.