After a day or two of this, any other trout fishing you may have done will seem like daytime television.
Tony Hayes has eight or nine rivers he choppers clients into from Tongariro Lodge. Three of these are trophy rivers, where the fish will average seven pounds and an angler on any given day will almost positively cast to a trout of ten pounds or more. On others of his helicopter rivers the fish are smaller, averaging around four pounds, but a good angler might catch twenty of these in a day.
From Simon Dickie’s splendid Poronui Ranch, also on the North Island, clients can be choppered in to one of five peerless bush rivers. On one of these, Simon, Tom Montgomery, and I spotted fourteen fish over seven pounds in a half-day’s fishing. Fifteen minutes of helicopter time from the banks of this river put you in the Jacuzzi on the deck at Poronui with a drink in your hand watching pretty Simone grill the venison steaks or paradise duck breasts.
There are similar delights to be had on the South Island. Ray Grubb’s Lake Brunner Lodge near Hokitiki, Dick Fraser’s Cedar Lodge near Wanaka, Mick Mason’s Motueka River Lodge and Bob Haswell’s Rotoroa Lodge, both near Nelson, all offer guided helicopter access to pristine bush rivers during the day, and world-class wining, dining, and lodging at night.
And for people who don’t want lodge-based fishing, there are a very select number of top independent guides on both islands who specialize in chopper fishing. One of these, the redoubtable Tony Entwhistle from Nelson, has probably done more helicopter fishing with clients than anyone in New Zealand. He believes that chopper fishing has less negative impact on the fragile bush environment than many hike-in fishing trips, which he also guides into some of the same remote areas; he believes, too, that helicopter fishing is all about mystery and dream, and he wants to write a book about it someday called No Footprints in the Sand.
My first New Zealand helicopter fishing experience was in 1984 with another of those independent guides. Vern Brabant took my wife and me up to a South Island river whose name sounds like “Whockamui,” where we camped in an old deer-culler’s shack. For three perfect days we fished to the biggest and most discriminating trout I had ever seen in an untellably beautiful setting. At night Vern would butterfly a trout, plank it on twigs, and run it up the chimney on a branch to smoke while we sat around the fire eating smoked oysters and then fried lamb chops, drinking good Scotch out of tin cups, and listening to the “more-pork” birds and the possums howling in the bush. It would have taken more strength than I have not to become addicted.
New Zealand’s backcountry trout can haunt you as no other fish can do, and the rivers they inhabit can come to possess a part of your imagination and memory. Hughie McDowell from Rotorua is one of the North Island’s best and most experienced helicopter fishing guides. He is also one of the most charming men alive and he owns a poet’s soul. Once on a chopper camping trip to a particularly poignant river whose name sounds like “Myaroa,” Hughie and I took a break from fishing to sit on a couple of boulders and have a taste of single malt from the silver flask his wife, “Knuckles,” had given him. We tasted and sat, tasted and sat, listening to the mesmerizing chatter of the river.
“You know,” said Hughie, “whenever I’m in a bus station, or Los Angeles, someplace I really hate, doing something I really hate, all I have to do is say the word ‘Myaroa’ and I’m here. It’s like stepping into a dream.”
On one of the elegant upstairs walls of the Motueka River Lodge there is a gouache done by a young New Zealand artist named Peter Jewett, who is wise enough, reportedly, to do nothing with his time but paint and fish. This picture is a portrait of the olive: A man stands in a wild stream, his back to us, sunlight on his hat, his right arm, the tip of his rod, and his fly line. He stands on a bar of silver-dollar-sized stones, white, yellow, red, and russet, exactly as they are in the real river. There is a thin plume of silver broken water downstream of his legs, exactly as there should be, and pinpoints of light on the rippled water’s surface.
In front of the man the bar drops onto a white sand bottom; beyond that the water deepens to green and then almost to black against the rock face of the bank.
Silhouetted against the white sand is a huge, dark trout. The angler’s rod is bowed, either in lifting the line for a cast or in striking this fish—this great, once-in-a-lifetime fish, emerged from the black run by the rock face and now here, visible against the white sand for a single moment of possibility. For a moment, dream has become a difficult, one-time opportunity, and there is late sunlight on the thin line running from the mind of this man to the fish, either in offering or in contact.
The name of the stream in the picture sounds like “Rarimea.”
Copyright © 2000, 2017 by Charles Gaines
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
Cover design by Tom Lau
Cover painting by John Swan; fly illustration by iStockphoto
Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-1789-3
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-1792-3
Printed in the United States of America.
FAT BOY’S LONESOME FISHING GUIDE BLUES
I’d better gather up my tackle
And wind a little hackle,
I’ve got another fishing job tomorrow morning.
It’s five hundred miles from here,
Just got time for one short beer.
Fishing with these geeks can sure get boring.
—FROM “FAT BOY’S LONESOME TRAVELING FISHING GUIDE BLUES,” BY A.J. DEROSA, SUNG TO THE TUNE OF RED STEAGAL’S “RODEO BLUES”
IT IS AROUND TEN-THIRTY ON A BEAUTIFUL MONTANA MORNING. It is windless, the sky is clear, and the temperature is rising along a steep western spring trajectory that has already taken it well into the sixties from near freezing at first light, and will carry it into the nineties by midafternoon. A.J. DeRosa, sole proprietor of “Fat Boy Fishing, Custom Fly-Fishing Trips Throughout the Intermountain West”; Tom Montgomery, fishing guide, photographer, and longtime DeRosa fan and friend; and I are standing hip-deep in eastern Montana’s Bighorn River, fishing a particularly trouty-looking run. A.J.’s old wooden drift boat is anchored by the bank, with his black Lab, Caladonia, snoozing in the bow. We have been on the river since sunup. We were the first boat to put in this morning below the dam at Fort Smith, but the customary Bighorn hordes are out now and the river is choked with drift boats and anglers in a recurring nightmare for A.J., one he had to learn to live with.
As it happens, many of these anglers don’t know much about what they are doing. For example, after about five minutes of nymphing the run I hook a fat rainbow that jumps garishly several times and attracts the attention of an angler casting thirty yards upstream of us, close to the minimum polite distance. The man watches me fight the fish, net it—a dark, nicely colored henfish, it is, of about five pounds—and release it. Then he strolls down the bank and begins fishing no more then twenty feet from me, angling his casts downstream to cover the same water the rainbow had come from. He even looks over and offers us all a sweet, dumb grin.
Standing by his boat, A.J. says loudly, “The amazing thing about this river is that guys w
ill just come right into your hole and start fishing. I mean, sure, some of them are just natural idiots and don’t know what the hell they’re doing, but they should learn.” Just then the unfortunate fisherman hooks a trout. He glances guiltily over his shoulder at us, at A.J. staring holes through him, and the fish—very possibly the only one he will hook all day—breaks off. The man sighs, obviously relieved, and reels in his line. As he trudges ashore, he says, pathetically, “I’m sorry I’m in your hole. I’ve never fished here before. I didn’t know.”
The geek knows now, taught by the stern schoolmaster of the Bighorn; what he doesn’t know is that he got off lightly. Others on this river have suffered much harsher lessons in fishing etiquette from A.J. DeRosa. Like the three guys who once floated right over a pod of feeding fish that he was casting a dry fly to, then parked their boat and began fishing between him and Tom Montgomery. Montgomery is small but feisty. He stomped over to the three men and began dressing them down, but when A.J. walked over he was oddly calm, almost conciliatory. Tom couldn’t believe it. The three guys agreed unpleasantly to walk upstream out of sight to fish. A few minutes later, Tom watched A.J. fish down to their boat, dawdle by it for a while, then casually fish his way down to Tom. “Tom,” he said sunnily. “Don’t get mad. Get even.” And he held up the plug from the interlopers’ boat.
“I take fishing personally,” is A.J.’s comment on this story.
With a year-old degree in business administration from the University of Detroit, Anthony John DeRosa drove out west looking for a ski bum’s life in 1972. Like many another aspiring ski bum, he settled in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and has stayed there, more or less, ever since. Within two years he was guiding fishermen on the Snake River for a local outfitter during the summer and fall, and working as a ski patrolman during the winter. Now, eighteen years later, at forty-four, he still hasn’t found a better way to split his time and sort of earn a living. And that degree in business administration is now what it was when he first got it: a teat on a boar.
There are fishing guides and there are fishing guides: lazy ones, hardworking ones; good, bad, and so-so ones; charmers and louts. Take it from someone who has fished with most of the identified species, as a client what you should want most in a person you pay to take you fishing is the same thing you should want in a bird dog: a slobbering, breakneck passion for what he or she does.
It should be added that people, fishing guides and otherwise, with such passion tend to be a little idiosyncratic, better kept in the kennel than in the house—a little maverick, if you will. And in fact a whole subcategory of fishing guides of this stripe exists. You can find these hungry-eyed, unhousebroken types on charter boats along the Great Barrier Reef and in skiffs in the Keys, working the fly-out lodges of Alaska, the flats in Belize, and the salmon rivers of Labrador. Anywhere sports plunk down cold cash to be put over fish, you can find some guy who has severely bent his life over going fishing for a living and would happily bend another one in the same way as long as he can have someone in the bow to talk to and buy the beer. Sure, they’re a little demanding, maybe, and they might get you in a bar fight or two; they can’t be trusted to order the best Calvados, and they rarely if ever come all turned out in crisp khakis the way the guides in the magazines do; but, trust me, these are the guides whose boats you want to be in—whether you enjoy the experience or not.
If there was a Westminster Show for such guides, A.J. DeRosa might win Best of Breed. He pays three hundred dollars a month for rent in Jackson Hole. He owns one-third of a dilapidated trailer; an orange ’76 propane-fueled van with a cracked windshield, a sign on the dash quoting Thoreau, and a license plate that says “Fat”; a fifteen-year old, six-hundred-dollar wooden Keith Steele drift boat with trailer; the sleepy black Lab, Caladonia; some skis, waders, and fishing tackle; and that’s about it.
“There are two ways of avoiding the middle-class American trap,” he says. “You can make a ton of dough and rise above it, or you can drop right out of the bottom. There are two leisure classes in this country, and I’m in one of them. My clients are in the other. That’s why we are natural collaborators.” This is distilled passionate/maverick fishing-guide philosophy. And so is this: “Very few people realize that you can do exactly whatever it is you want to do.”
A.J. likes to ski, but mostly what he has wanted to do since he came out west is fish and take people fishing. He has guided in Alaska, and in 1979 he and a girl named Patty Reilly went down to Patagonia to fishing-bum around, fell in love with that wild, dusty place, and went back the following season to start a guiding business that lasted four years. Otherwise, A.J.’s guiding turf has been and remains the entire “intermountain West.”
The great majority of trout guides guide on one river, or maybe two or three, all within easy day-trip distance from their wives and mortgages. But there’s a small group of road-loving guides in the West like A.J.—unmarried, unmortgaged, unregenerate—who guide wherever they want to be, hitting the West’s great trout rivers as they come hot in a movable feast from the beginning of the season to the end. The Green in Utah; the Snake and New Fork in Wyoming; New Mexico’s San Juan; Idaho’s Henry’s Fork and South Fork; the Madison, Bighorn, Big Hole, Missouri, and Yellowstone in Montana are just a few of these waters, and ones that nobody will care if I name.
A typical ten-day gig for A.J. might consist of meeting a client (probably one of his two dozen or so regulars) at the airport in Billings, fishing the Bighorn for three days, driving a day for two days’ fishing on the Yellowstone or in the park, then over to the Big Hole for three days before dropping off the trout-sated sport in Bozeman for his flight back east. From this and from guiding his home-water Snake River in August and September—for a total of some eighty days over five or six months of dusty driving, trailering and untrailering his boat, making lunches, tying leader knots, and taking flies out of trout lips—A. J. grosses around fifteen thousand dollars.
Every once in a while he envies the guides who stay on one stream, who guide more days and drive fewer (and he can congratulate the “very heavy wiring in their brains” that allows them to go up and down the same piece of water like a yo-yo day in and day out for the reward, if they are lucky and good, of becoming, finally, the “deans” of their streams), but not very often. Winter is for being in one place. Summer is for moving and the trout-bum, Plains Indian mentality: go where the fishing is good and follow it around, don’t leave too much of yourself anywhere, smoke what you can’t eat and take it with you.
“Sure, I could’ve done something else, but everybody pays a price for what they do. We pay a price, and the $200,000-a-year guys we guide pay a price. We’re giving them a little piece of heaven for a few days and then they go back to their rat mazes. They give us a little piece of heaven when they lay a nice tip on us and we can go buy a case of good beer, and not have to drink Schmidt’s. Drinking Schmidt’s is the price we pay.”
And then there are the rivers themselves—coming back into them each year one at a time, like into old friends’ houses, some better kept than others . . .
He’s been fishing really bad
And he lost the good ones that he had,
Then he hooks a hog that should’ve been the clincher.
He smiles a silly grin,
And says, “I broke him off again.”
And they don’t ever leave no tip for an eleven-incher.
We go off the river for a couple of hours in midafternoon and back onto it at five-thirty to fish until dark. Just before we take out around two, A.J. and I find a couple of not-very-big brown trout regularly sipping something off the surface in a difficult spot, a spot of floating weed to hang up your fly on every cast and of conflicting currents to ruin your drift over the fish. We fish to these browns for an hour, both of us, taking turns, going to lighter and lighter leader tippets, putting on every fly we can think of, including A.J.’s standby ant—and the two browns disdain to notice us, like a couple of secretaries turning up the
ir noses at whistling hardhats.
A.J. is still in a good mood over this when we start fishing again, but his mood starts to fade when we get a look at our company for the evening fishing. The river is covered upstream and down with drift boats, more of them by far than A.J. and Tom have ever seen this early in the season. Among them, moreover, is a flotilla of ten to fifteen little single-man pontoon boats, horrible little sky-blue, high-tech cheapos that belong in a pond at Disneyland with kids in them, their owners chatting and whooping back and forth, fishing and hollering and drifting inexpertly all over A.J.’s precious Bighorn.
Which was, before the crowds, arguably North America’s finest trout river: twelve miles of blue-ribbon water below Yellowtail Dam, floating at a cool, constant temperature. The high pH that the Bighorn gets from its limestone substrata and a high aquatic mineral content encourage vast, fertile weed beds that are fast-food restaurants for trout, and the river is home to more (nearly seven thousand) and bigger wild trout per mile than any river in the continental United States. A large part of it that flows within a Crow Indian reservation was only opened to non-Indian fishing in 1981. For a number of years after that, the river was an uncrowded trouting paradise. A.J.’s first year on the Bighorn was ’82, and he’s been back every year since. For years here he could show his clients some of the highest-quality trout fishing in the world; now they still catch fish, but what he shows them, too often, is a river full of blue toy boats.
On the bank we drink a tin cup or two of bourbon, smoke stogies, and cook lamb chops, waiting for an evening rise of fish that doesn’t happen. A.J.’s first choice for a place to fish this evening was taken, and so were his second and third. He stirs the fire with a stick and watches one of the blue boats float by backwards. “You can see now why the Worm has to be blown up,” he sighs.
The Worm is an eight-foot-by-thirty-five-foot 1942 Nashua trailer. A.J. and two guide friends bought it for seven hundred dollars sight unseen from a Mexican in 1983 and lived in it for five or six years, whenever they were guiding on the Bighorn. In its heyday the Worm was parked down at Cottonwoods Campground, where most of the other itinerant Bighorn guides stay, and a lot of life came and went through it in the mid- and late eighties—a lot of partying, a lot of wild duck and Cabernet dinners. Now it is parked in a friend’s backyard, dilapidated and unused, a sort of mini-museum of the good days on the Bighorn. The two guides who bought it with A.J. are now both working on second families: one is a businessman, the other a schoolteacher.
The Next Valley Over Page 3