A River Never Sleeps

(An excerpt from The La st Cast - Fishing Reminiscences, published by Hancock House.)

Fly fishing creates, in the minds of non-fly fishermen, a mental block - a built-in resistance. It looks difficult. Worse, many people who write about it make it sound difficult, too.

Illustration by Lana Bouchard

Mind you, there are difficult things about fly fishing if you want to write books on entomology. There are gillions of mayflies in the world, for example, and for anyone who believes that one must know the precise Latin name for each species, it is about seven years at university - minimum.

Even then, the experts often aren’t much help. Where I fish in the Kamloops area (the Spanish Inquisition in its heyday couldn’t get me to be more specific than that) there are two types of mayfly that hatch during the main part of the season. When I consult my experts, they tell me that the mayfly species most prominent in Kamloops is the Callibaetis, with a lesser hatch of Caenis.

Well, let me tell you about the lesser hatch. It is a hell of a lot lesser. In fact, it is damn near nonexistent.

As to Callibaetis, what the experts don’t tell you is that on some lakes and at some times it has a black body, at other times the body is a dark green. In each case the beast has two tails (some mayflies have three) and apart from the color, they seem to be the same species.

But let us suppose that they are not. The question is, who cares?

Oh, Gary Lafontaine cares. Ernest Schwiebert cares. Ray Bergman and Vince Marinaro would have cared. But I don’t give a damn because I tie two mayfly patterns, both of which have two white deer hairs for tails, white thread for ribbing, and deer hair tied as a comparadun for hackle. Half of them have a jet-black body, the other half are dark green. And they both do very well when there is a hatch. In fact, I have even caught fish with the black mayfly when the green ones are hatching and vice versa. All I need to know is what the mayfly generally looks like and I’ll leave the Latin to the scholars.

The temptation is to let the experts confound you. Now, don’t get me wrong - I not only admire the experts, I consult them frequently. The trouble is, many of the people published by fly fishing magazines as experts are no more knowledgeable than I am - which is to say not very. They are just better known.

When, for example, you read about the new damselfly pattern for Northwest waters (that’s Americanese for Washington, Oregon and Idaho) it often bears very little resemblance to the damselfly nymphs in your favorite water. In the Kamloops area, and I might add in Lake Otamangakau near Taupo, New Zealand (about as far from Kamloops as you can get) the fly is about a #12 1X long - a Mustad 3906B will do - and brown-olive in color. The article you read will probably tell you to use a #10 3 or 4X long and tie it pale yellow - which might catch fish, but it will sure scare the hell out of any real damselfly nymphs it meets in my lake!

Unfortunately, the tendency among fly fishermen is often to ignore their own eyes in favor of the expert.

This tendency prevails in New Zealand as well. With the exception of my pals at “The Store” at Te Rangi Ita, who know what they are doing, you will find that the commercial ties of damsels are usually far bigger than the real thing. If you fish Otamangakau from the shore during a hatch, you will be literally covered with hatching damselflies and it is quite evident that either they have developed a midget mutation or the commercial tiers need better spectacles.

Two lessons come out of this.

Illustration by Lana Bouchard

First, commercial flies are tied with the fisherman, not the fish, in mind. The fisherman, looking over a tray of lies, will remember some nonsense like “big flies, big fish,” which is about as sensible a slogan as “drive for show and putt for dough” is in golf. My friends at my local fly shop, Ruddick’s, on Granville Island in Vancouver, tell me that size sells first, then color. Accuracy is a poor third.

Second, and paradoxically, the professional tiers do have something going for them. While many experts will disagree, I’m here to tell you as a non expert who has caught a few fish in his time, that sometimes a fly that is a little bigger than the natural one gets the action. This is especially true with chironomid or midges, where literally hundreds of thousands of the little buggers are hatching at once, often in different sizes and colors.

Let us assume that quite small, say #18 regular, black, are the main hatch. My theory is that fish are no different than any animals, including, and especially including, people. They will take something for nothing if they can get it. As they are swimming along, letting Chironomidae roll down their throats, fish have no need to move a muscle to one side or another. Why should they - unless, of course, a large dose of calories is but a turn of the head away, requiring less loss of calories than will be taken in with the extra effort. When there are several sizes of chironomid hatching at the same time, which is a frequent occurrence, I think it is just common sense to try the larger imitation.

The trouble is, you never know. I remember fishing at a small lake near Kamloops with about a dozen other fly fishermen during a magnificent chironomid hatch. We were all getting fish, but Dave was doing about twice as well as anyone else. After watching his performance, I asked him what he was using. “A dark green on a #14 regular,” was his reply. “But there are no green chironomid hatching,” I replied. “I know,” he said. How do you figure it?

Sort of on the same topic, let me tell you about what was probably the best three hours of fishing I have ever had. I was fishing Stump Lake on the old highway between Merritt and Kamloops, at the north end. It was a dull, sultry early June day, and while I had caught a couple of fish, I thought I might move on and give the little lake at Lac Le Jeune a shot.

As I was rowing back, I noticed fish bulging in a little bay. This interested me for, among other things, Stump Lake is known for very big rainbows. (One of the other things it is noted for is wind, of which there was none this day.) These fish were almost certainly on damselfly nymphs.

I anchored and put on a damsel nymph with a floating line and was very quickly into a fish. Almost every cast, I hooked one. Clearly they were feeding just as the nymphs were reaching the reeds upon which they were hatching.

A thought crossed my mind: they are feeding so voraciously I wonder if they would rise to a dry? At this point, I had hooked nineteen fish, boated perhaps a dozen, all released, in a little over an hour.

I put on a dark olive Humpy (the same color as the nymphs) and cast among the feeding fish. No action, at least not until I had cast about half a dozen times. Then a nice four-pound hen took the Humpy as if it were feeding on hatching sedges. To make a long story short, I stayed for another couple of hours and brought the grand total to forty-six for the afternoon, all out of the same small bay, most on a dry when the fish were feeding on nymphs.

They ranged from three pounds to just over eight (the one fish I killed). The expert would have, I should think, advised the damsel nymph on a floater, the same diagnosis I first and rightly made. Only the curious would take a chance that the fish could be coaxed into something different - like a dry fly, not even attempting to match the adult of the hatch. Being curious often pays.

There are places, and circumstances, where the fish are very particular. Though I have never fished there, I believe that eastern American rivers such as the Beaverkill are places where you have to match the hatch with some particularity. The trouble is, people read the excellent literature that has originated from these waters and take from that the wrong message.

This is compounded by the nonsense (I warn you, these comments are lese majeste of the worst kind!) that came out of the dry fly school pioneered by Frederick Halford on the Hampshire Test in the early years of the century. According to Halford, and his American protege the revered Theodore Gordon, one fished a perfect match of the hatch, upstream to a feeding fish or one didn’t fish at all. Now Halford was a great man, and so was Gordon. Their writings make very interesting reading to this day. But I simply am not prepared to put myself in that sort of a straitjacket. Nor, in my view, should you.