Every Day Was Special
Page 1
William G. Tapply
Foreword by Nick Lyons
Copyright © 2010 the estate of William G. Tapply Foreword copyright © 2010 by Nick Lyons
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tapply, William G.
Every day was special : a fly fisher’s lifelong passion / William G. Tapply.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-60239-955-6 (alk. paper)
1. Fly fishing—Anecdotes. 2. Tapply, William G. 3. Fishers—United States--Biography. I. Title.
SH456.T349 1997
799.12’4—dc22
2009045558
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Foreword
Introduction
Part I
WHERE, WHEN, WHY
Are We Fly Fishing Yet?
Opening Day 1938
Just an Average Day
Same Time Next Year
Counting Coup
The Truth About Fly Fishermen
Part II
COLD WATER
Why Trout Eat, and Why They Don’t
When Trout Get Antsy
Dam It
Out of Season
Tuna Fish Sandwiches and Other Inert Materials
Fear of Midges
My Love Affair with Spring Creeks
Part III
WARM WATER
Bass-Bug Humbug
Mr. Bass
The Perfect Fish
Just Fishin’ with Uncle Ray
The Pig Boat
Part IV
SALT WATER
First Light
Silence on the Flats
Turkey Bones
The Bones of Deadman’s Cay
Spring Break
The Hunt for November Reds
Daisy-Chain Blues
Part V
SOME FLIES
The Mongrel Bugger
Bloodsuckers
Clumped Hackles
Tap’s Nearenuf
Old-Time New England Trout and Salmon Flies
Foreword
Every Day Was Special registers much of the measure of a special human being. Bill Tapply is always present in these reports of days on the water—always curious, with great common sense, down-home warmth, passion, unflagging good cheer and wit, a generous spirit, a flair for adventure, and a positive genius for friendship. You cannot help but love the man. You learn with and from him, enjoy fishing (in print) with him, share his lifelong joy in all manner of fishing (especially with a fly) and feel everywhere a balance and modesty rare among folk who write about this sport. If style is the man—and I think it surely is—Bill gives us, in every word he wrote, a man who truly could find every day on the water to be special.
Bill died of leukemia at age sixty-nine in late July 2009, after a two-year struggle with the disease; during this time, he wrote at least five books. He had taught high school for twenty-five years in Lexington, Massachusetts, and then, when he began to publish his first novels, at Emerson College and as writer-in-residence at Clark University. He wrote more than twenty excellent mystery novels featuring a fly-fishing detective named Brady Coyne, of whom he explained: “He has neither the cynical world view of some private eyes nor the excessive honor of others.… he’s very much like me. I’d rather have you identify with him than admire him. He’s not bigger than life. He’s just about life-sized.” He wrote other mysteries, too, and a fine book about how to write the stuff; and he also wrote numerous articles about fly fishing and upland-bird hunting for Field & Stream, Sports Illustrated, American Angler, and others, and a dozen books on those subjects, most of which I was proud to edit or publish. He had been an excellent athlete in high school and remained so well into his adult years. Bill was a quiet, kind man who knew how to listen and was adept at the fishing and bird-hunting he loved. Everyone who knew him or read what he wrote will miss this patient, thoughtful man.
What we have and never need miss, of course, are his words. Every Day Was Special—finished not long before he died and due off press in the spring, a time he loved for its augury of yet another new season—has some of his best words. It is a full and consistently engaging collection that traces the arc of his fishing life from his first days fishing in a nearby pond to days on western spring creeks, on ocean flats and warmwater lakes, and practical advice on a whole range of matters piscatorial. Of those first days, and of the “hook” that led him to a lifetime of sport, he writes: “It’s been a lifelong, ever-expanding journey, with many big fish and faraway waters and dramatic moments … and yet I don’t think any of those moments or any of those places or fish has thrilled me any more than seeing the twitch of my fly line where it entered the muddy waters of my backyard pond …”
Though he fished and hunted birds with the likes of his father— the great “ Tap” Tapply—Lee Wulff, Frank Woolner, Ollie Rodman, Burt Spiller, and others of their ilk—his early days are characterized most by what he learned by himself. His father encouraged him to find his own sport and he did, and what he reports in this book are the first-hand observations of a man who experienced it all himself and never stopped learning. There is a happy and irresistible freshness and New England independence to his thoughts. I especially like the way he explores some of the more controversial issues, such as whether a particular brand of fishing is somehow “better” or “higher” than another. He even-handedly explains that though he eschews snobbishness about the methods of pursuit one chooses, he happens to love beyond all else the dramatic rise of a trout to a dry fly. He never knocks another man’s sport and only repeats what his father rightly notes, that a man can be as much of a hog whether he fished with a worm or a fly. I like too that he can change his mind. In the remarkable tailwater fishing now available throughout the country, he has found ample good reason not to despise the Army Corps of Engineers, for their dam building, as his father did and he did for decades, as I blindly did for many years before fishing below dams in Arkansas, Montana, and New York State.
Bill loved the quiet rituals of angling: being with friends he held close—Andy, Marshall, Norm, and others—at given times, and the rhythmic return to such places with such people year after year. He had special passions, like fishing the challenging spring creeks of the West, and the subtleties of fly fishing, like discovering how best to fish when the trout are taking ants or midges, perhaps. He loved challenging days fishing in salt water, for blues, bonefish, redfish, snook, or stripers, and all his life he was devoted to bass-bug fishing, begun with his father for smallmouth on New Hampshire lakes and enduring until his last summer. He wrote wonderfully well about bass-bugging—both in a solid practical book and numerous essays; less than a year ago, when his cancer was in remission, he made me swear that we would fish for largemouth bass together this past August, that he’d bring plenty of bugs and would trailer his rowboat to my corner of the Catskills and row me around. It did not happen.
Bill was also a devoted and careful fly tier, and this book ends with sol
id advice on how to tie some extremely effective patterns for bass, trout, saltwater fish, and his favorite New England flies. Like his father’s great bass bug, which Bill tied to perfection, his approach to all fly tying—and all fishing (and in fact all of his life and all of his writing) was simple, elegant, practical, and wise. Every Day Was Special is filled with these qualities, in its deceptively easy prose, entertaining anecdotes, and sensible suggestions that cannot help but improve the quality and success of a reader’s fly-fishing life.
The fine mystery writer Vicki Stiefel, his longtime companion and wife, said that Bill was her soul mate, her joy, her best friend—a very special person with whom she shared an interesting and compelling life. Letting his many friends know that he was gone, she wrote: “My beloved Bill died last night. His passing was soft, and he was surrounded by myself and his five children. He will be missed.”
You bet he will.
—Nick Lyons
December 2009
Introduction
Just as the twig is bent, the tree’s inclined.
—Alexander Pope, Moral Essays
When I was a kid growing up in the suburbs, a warm-water pond lay just over the hill and through the woods behind my house. In the endless summer days of my boyhood, armed with a hand-me-down bamboo fly rod (a mass-produced South Bend 8-footer with a shortened tip), an old Pfleuger reel wound with a cracked HDH double-taper line, an envelope of size-6 Eagle Claw bait hooks, a spool of 8-pound monofilament, and a Campbell’s soup can of freshly dug earthworms, I haunted the place. I learned how to handle a fly rod by rollcasting a hook impaled with a gob of worms (you couldn’t make an ordinary cast without losing your bait) into the stained waters of my little pond.
The fascination of the pond lay in its opaqueness. I could see its surface, but what lay underneath, where the fish lived, was a mystery. Had I been able to put a boat on the pond (it was considered too dirty for swimming, and my parents made it a condition of my fishing there that I would never dive in), perhaps I could have studied its bottom, and my fascination with it would have diminished. But I never did peer down through its surface. I only experienced it from the shore, and my only connection to what lay underneath was the baited hook at the end of my line.
There wasn’t a foot of shoreline where I didn’t sink a forked stick into the mud and lob out my worm, and during the countless hours and days I fished there, I learned the pond’s hot spots, places where the bites came more frequently, or the fish ran bigger, or the species were more interesting. I liked to try to figure out why one area produced different results from the others, and I liked trying to visualize the contours of the bottom out there, and the kinds of cover that might hold fish, and the sorts of forage that might attract them. I pictured drop-offs, holes, rock piles, weed beds. At different times of day and season, and under different weather conditions, I learned, some areas fished better than others.
So I rollcast my worm, propped my stubby South Bend rod on a forked stick sunk into the pond-side mud, stripped out an extra coil of line, and crouched there on my haunches, staring at the old yellow fly line where it entered the water, willing it to twitch to life. I did this for hours at a time, day after day, and never got tired of it.
There was nothing more thrilling than that first hesitant shudder, then the quick jerk, and then the slither of line through the guides signaling that a fish had taken my worm into its mouth. What was it? A yellow perch? A horned pout? A bluegill? A crappie? A sucker? Something more exotic, maybe, such as a largemouth bass or an eel or a carp? Or, the ultimate prize, a brook trout, a rare leftover from the year when somebody had tried stocking the place?
I’d pluck the rod from the forked stick, aim it straight down the line to give the fish a frictionless pull, gingerly finger the line, feel the life in it as it slid out over my finger and through the guides. Soon came the moment of truth when some instinct told me that the fish had my worm firmly in its mouth but had not yet swallowed it, and it was time to snug the line against the handle and lift the rod, setting the hook.
Sometimes the cheap fly rod bent acutely, but more often the lift of the rod brought a malnourished little panfish skimming to the surface.
Usually it was a thumb-sized perch or horned pout or a cracker-sized bluegill, the stunted species with which the pond was wildly overpopulated, but nothing ever disappointed me. I treasured all fish of all species and sizes. Fish were wild and mysterious and elusive. They lived where they couldn’t be observed and studied, so everything I knew about them came from fishing for them and imagining their lives.
I couldn’t get enough of fish. Feeling them tugging on my line, holding them in my hand, unhooking them and letting them go (I probably could have created a healthy population of panfish in my pond single-handedly if I’d killed everything I caught, but I liked knowing that lots of fish swam there; I was a confirmed catch-and-release advocate when I was in the third grade)—all of that was fun. But always the best moment was seeing that first twitch of my line that told me I had succeeded in my quest, that I had made a connection with a fish.
It’s tempting to think of those countless summer hours at my muddy little pond as my apprenticeship in fly fishing, as a child’s game that would evolve into something that was more important and worthwhile. Rollcasting worms into my pond did teach me how to handle a fly rod, and the feel of a fly rod loading the line became embedded in my muscle memory. After thousands of rollcasts, progressing to normal casting was a small and simple step.
It was inevitable that I’d try flies on my pond. They didn’t work as well as worms, but I did catch my first dry-fly fish (a crappie about 5 inches long that sucked in a size-12 brown Bivisible) and my first gamefish on a fly (a hot-dog-sized largemouth bass that ate a Parmacheene Belle wet fly) from that pond.
But I don’t think of those summers as a mere apprenticeship, as a preparation for something more exalted and valid. Lobbing worms into that muddy little pond over the hill was important for its own sake. Those were the innocent days in this boy’s youth when my world was just a few surface acres big and everything important happened under the surface where it could not be seen, but could be fully and vividly imagined.
It took me all of those summers—thousands of hours, I’m sure—to learn as much about water and fish and fly casting as Lefty Kreh could probably teach me in a single afternoon. But I learned it all by myself, by trying and erring repeatedly, and so it felt—it still feels—hard-earned and important. Most fly fishermen that I know began fly fishing with, well, with flies, and with fancy equipment, and with helpful—and often insistent—instruction. Their loss, if you ask me.
My dad encouraged me to go over the hill to my muddy little pond with my can of worms and my beat-up South Bend stick, and he didn’t try to teach me or caution me, and even at the time I knew enough to appreciate his hands-off philosophy.
It’s been a long time since I crouched beside a pond with my fly rod propped on a forked stick. I’ve learned that there are many ways to be thrilled by fish, and many species of fish to thrill me. I’ve tried most of them, and I like them all.
It’s easy in this fly-fishing passion to get caught up in complications and technicalities and fine distinctions, and why not? Fly fishing is endlessly fascinating because you can always get better at it. Nobody, not Lefty Kreh or Lee Wulff or Al McClane, has ever entirely mastered the combinations of knowledge and skill and intuition and luck that are required to do it perfectly.
But even at its simplest, fly fishing—all fishing—appeals to something inborn in all of us. I’ve never met a kid who didn’t just naturally like fishing, and who didn’t intuitively understand the straightforward physics of casting a line with a fly rod.
I was lucky to have a fly-fishing father who opened up my fishing world. He let me trek over the hill to my pond without giving me instruction or advice, but as I got older he took me to lakes and ponds and rivers and streams all over New England, too, and he showed me many different
ways to entice many different species of fish to attach themselves to the end of my line.
It’s been a lifelong, ever-expanding journey, with many big fish, far away waters, and dramatic moments … and yet I don’t think any of those moments or places or fish has thrilled me more than seeing the twitch of my fly line where it entered the muddy waters of my backyard pond, picking up the rod, watching the line slither through the guides, setting the hook at just the right moment, and stripping in a thumb-sized yellow perch.
The essays here were all published, in some form, in my back-page column “Reading the Currents” in American Angler, or in Gray’s Sporting Journal, or in Field & Stream. I am indebted to the estimable editors of those publications—Phil Monahan, Jim Babb, and Slaton White—for their guidance and encouragement and tolerance over the years. I have tinkered with many of these essays in an effort to make them fit into the general tone and purpose of this book. A writer, like a fly fisherman, never stops tinkering.
The quotations that introduce the sections are chosen, in all cases, from the writings of old friends and fishing companions. I am grateful to Harold F. Blaisdell; Ed Zern; Datus Proper; Norm Zeigler; Dick Brown; and, of course, H. G. Tapply, my dad, for their companionship and for their mentoring, as well as for their wise words.
My thanks also to Jay Cassell, my editor; Nick Lyons, my guru; Tony Lyons, my publisher; and Bob White, my favorite outdoor artist, for making it happen.
Chickadee Farm
Hancock, New Hampshire
April 2009
PART I
WHERE, WHEN, WHY
When fishermen adopt the habit of studying a book between casts, fishing will have come to a pretty pass indeed. There is little danger of this eventuality, however, for no book can substitute for experience. This is a blessing, for were such a book possible, it would take much of the fun out of the game.