Every Day Was Special

by William G. Tapply

  You know how this story ends. Pretty soon my big tarpon was gone. It took a long time to wind all the line and backing onto my reel.

  “You got to show heem who’s boss,” said Pancho, our Belizean guide. “Down and dirty, mon.”

  Now he tells me, I thought.

  “You had him on for twenty minutes,” said Andy.

  “That’s too long, mon,” said Pancho. “Big feesh wear a hole in his mouth, hook come out. Too long. Get heem in quick or he get away.”

  “Those leaps were awesome,” Andy said. “He was so close you could’ve touched him with your rod tip.” He laughed. “Maybe you should’ve. You could have counted his coup.”

  I got my next shot at a giant tarpon in the waters near Islamorada a few years after my ignominy in Belize. Hans Carroll and I were tarpon hunting near some mangrove islands when a fish rolled beside our boat. My fly got there first, and once again we were treated to the unforgettable tarpon air show.

  This time, though, when the big fish decided to make a break for it, I remembered Pancho’s words. “Down and dirty, mon.” I angled my rod parallel to the water, put my hip into it, stopped its run, turned its head, forced it left when it wanted to go right, and pretty soon I was regaining line and the fish was flashing its silver side. It was beat.

  I levered the big tarpon alongside, reached out, grabbed the leader, and tried to steer it close enough that I could bring it into the boat. That was enough to inspire one last, tired thrust of its powerful tail. The leader pulled out of my hand, and before I could get the big fish back under control, it disappeared under the boat. Then it was gone.

  I slumped down on the seat. It had happened again. Bested by another tarpon.

  “Around here we consider that fish caught,” Hans said.

  “Really?”

  “Touching the leader of a hooked tarpon counts as a catch,” he said. “Way to go.”

  “I counted the big guy’s coup, huh?”

  “Exactly,” he said. “You showed great courage. An eagle feather for you.”

  “I feel much better,” I said.

  Strangely, I really did feel better. I had failed to bring that fish into the boat. I had no photograph of myself holding it in my arms as evidence of my triumph. But I didn’t consider myself a failure, as I had when my fly worked loose from the mouth of my Belize tarpon. I had counted this fish’s coup, and Hans was my witness.

  The native peoples of the plains—notably the Lakota and the Sioux— believed that sneaking close enough to an enemy warrior to touch him with hand or spear or coup stick was an act of great bravery and more deserving of respect and honor than killing him. According to legend, three different braves counted General Custer’s coup before he was massacred (at a battlefield not far from a river where I have counted numerous brown trout coups). To count an enemy’s coup is to declare: “I could have killed you, but I chose not to.” It asserts your superiority. It requires more stealth and courage and skill than shooting and killing from a distance. The Sioux rewarded a brave with an eagle feather for each coup he counted.

  Some Indian tribes insisted on taking the scalps of enemy warriors as proof of their superior strength, courage, and guile, much like fishermen who kill and mount their trophies.

  Counting human coup is more civilized and much less messy than killing and scalping one’s enemies. We count coup on tennis courts and golf courses, at poker tables and racetracks, in corporate boardrooms and courts of law.

  When I was a kid, I often fished alone, with no witnesses to my prowess. Even way back then I believed in the concept of catch and release, but sometimes the question arose: If you catch a big fish but nobody sees you do it, did you really catch it? Or, to put it another way: What good is it to catch a lunker if, when you tell about it, you don’t know if anyone believes you?

  My solution was to kill all of the big fish that I caught. I lugged them home to show my father, who always admired my trophies and praised my angling skill … and then made me clean and eat the fish whose life I’d taken. Out of respect for the fish, he said.

  Killing fish to win my father’s praise and to prove my worthiness always left me feeling ashamed rather than proud. Pretty soon I was able to forego the praise and the need for proof in exchange for the good feeling I got from releasing a living fish back into the water.

  Animal-rights, true-believers preach (with dubious scientific evidence) that catching fish by puncturing their mouths with hooks causes them pain. Fishermen think that “playing” fish is fun, but it denigrates and humiliates the fish, say the PETA people, and reduces them from noble wild creatures to our toys.

  I don’t quite buy it, but I get their point. More immediately, I’ve become aware of the numbers of fish I see floating belly-up in my trout streams after they’ve been caught and released—sometimes by me. Even debarbed hooks can be hard to extricate from deep in a fish’s throat without injuring it. It’s best for the fish’s health to land and release it quickly, before it’s exhausted. But lively fish twist and wiggle in your hand or net, inviting serious injury. A fly in the gills or in parts of the tongue or mouth will cause a fish to bleed, and a bleeding fish is a dead fish.

  For most of us, catch-and-release is the equivalent of counting coup. It’s our way of defining our victory over the fish, and it allows us to feel triumphant without taking a life. This seems like enormous progress from less than a century ago, when creels were standard equipment and fishermen were routinely photographed standing beside a dead marlin or holding one end of a long string of 5-pound native trout.

  Since I found peace with the idea that touching the leader of that big Islamorada tarpon was counting his coup, I’ve been wondering if there’s a way to improve on catch-and-release with barbless hooks. Start with the premise that the ultimate purpose of fly fishing is to “fool” the fish into taking our fly into its mouth. The high point of dry-fly fishing happens when we see a trout rise to our floating imitation. Yes, we like to hook the fish, to fight it to submission, to bring it to our hand, to remove the fly from its mouth, to cradle it in the water while it regains its strength, and then to release it and watch it swim away. If we fail to hook the fish that takes our fly, or if it breaks off or comes unbuttoned after we hook it, we are disappointed. But really, isn’t all of that anti-climactic? Shouldn’t the coup be counted when the fish tries to eat the fly?

  If we could be satisfied with this definition of “catching” a fish, if we could forego the mixed pleasure of fighting and handling the fish we fool, we could switch to flies without hooks. Some anglers (not me, not yet) have begun to cut the bends off their flies, and they claim to get great pleasure from fishing with them.

  Many veteran anglers go after tarpon with no intention of landing a single one of them. They want only to “jump” them. They like to hunt the fish, to cast to them, to induce them to take their fly, to hook them, and to witness that awesome burst of leaping. Then they shake the tarpon off or break it loose and go looking for another one.

  Chad Hanson, in the title story of his book Swimming with Trout, describes how, while snorkeling in a river, he discovered the sport of counting trout coup. “I inched toward the fish,” Hanson writes. “I held my right hand behind me and waved it just enough to keep my body in motion. It was a painstaking process, but I kept my cool until I was within two feet of the closest fish. Then my hand darted out and I gently pinched his tail.”

  Hanson says he hasn’t sold his fly rod, and even though it sounds like fun, I don’t intend to invest in a mask and fins and a wet suit. But I do aim to keep my focus on the purpose of our sport: To “touch” a fish by persuading it to take my fly into its mouth. To do this, I need to locate the fish, to sneak into casting position without spooking it, to tie on the right fly, and to present it convincingly.

  That should be enough. Shouldn’t it?

  The Truth About Fly Fishermen

  I arrived at my local trout stream just as the sun was dropping behind the trees. A p
ickup truck was parked in the pulloff. I stopped behind it, got out, and went to the bridge for a look. As I’d hoped and expected, spinners were swarming over the water, and the swallows were swooping around, and tiny trout dimples were showing the whole length of the long slow downstream pool.

  The two men from the pickup were standing on the bank at the head of the run puffing cigars and flipping lures with their spinning outfits.

  I watched them for a few minutes, then called, “How’re they biting?”

  “They’re not,” one of them said cheerfully, “unless you mean the mosquitoes.”

  “Mind if I fish below you?”

  “Help yourself. Plenty of water.”

  The other guy laughed. “No fish,” he said, “but lots of water.”

  I went back to my car, tugged on my waders, rigged up my 4-weight, slipped on my vest, and took the path down to the stream. I had to walk right behind the two spin fisherman to get to the lower end of the pool. They turned and nodded at me as I went by.

  I said, “Well, good luck,” and they said, “Yeah, you too, buddy. Go get ’em.”

  I stepped into the pool about three long double-hauls downstream from them and did what I usually do: I stood there and looked. Pretty soon I located half a dozen rising trout within casting range, and when I bent close to the water, I saw that the surface was littered with spent rusty spinners, about size 16.

  Voices are muffled in the evening mist that rises from a trout stream, so I couldn’t make out the actual words the two spin fishermen were muttering to each other. But I did hear them laugh, and I was pretty sure I knew what they were saying.

  “One of them damn anglers.” Spoken as if the word angler were a disgusting waste product.

  “Dry-fly snob. Thinks he’s better’n the rest of us.”

  “Yeah, no kidding. I heard one of them poles he’s using costs over a hundred bucks.”

  And so forth. I’d been hearing it all my life.

  The complete litany goes something like this:

  Fly fishermen in general are bad enough. Even those who fish with streamers and nymphs think they’re special, the way they throw back all their fish and sermonize about clean water. But the dry-fly snob is something else. You saw that movie. Dry-fly fishing is like a religion to him, like he’s got the inside track on God’s design. Probably has more money than God, too, with all that pricey gear he thinks he needs. He speaks Latin fluently and spends more time studying insects and worshipping the wonderments of nature than he does actually fishing for trout.

  You can’t talk to a dry-fly purist. If you ask him a friendly question like, “Any luck?” he’ll bore you with stories about the hoary traditions of dry-fly fishing, its ancient and honored roots in England where it all began nearly four hundred years ago, where they’re called “anglers,” not “fishermen,” and still wear tweed jackets, school ties, and plus-fours and fish by the strict rules of the river: Upstream dry flies only, cast from the bank (no wading, old chap), and only to rising trout. Which is the angler’s way of saying, “I’m not actually catching anything, but I’m having a wonderful time.”

  The dry-fly snob likes to show off his skill, the years it took him to master the delicate art of the fly rod. He loves the beauty of those graceful loops his line makes as it rolls out over the water. He’ll tell you he’d rather catch nothing than demean himself by using anything but a dry fly; if he does manage to hook something, he’ll make that expensive rod bend as if he’s hooked a monster; and if he ends up netting it, he’ll turn around and let it go. He thinks he’s the Ultimate Sportsman, and he fancies himself a poet. It’s all about the scent of clean air, the gurgle of rushing water, the symphony of birdsong, the fine art of casting, the craft of fly tying. He loves dry-fly fishing for its ambiance, its roots, its beauty, its difficulty.

  For its purity.

  He’s too cultured, of course, to say it, but if the dry-fly purist were to tell you what he really thinks, he’d tell you that the rest of us, those of us who just like get out of the house, catch a few fish, and have a good time, are crude slobs.

  He thinks he’s special. He loves the idea of being a fly fisherman more than he loves actually fishing.

  The fact is he’s pretentious, effete, condescending, and smug.

  That’s what those people are saying about us, mostly behind our backs. Now and then, toward evening. on a misty trout stream, you can hear them laughing at you.

  I like all kinds of fly fishing. Actually, I like all kinds of fishing. I’m not a dry-fly purist, but it is the kind of fishing I love the most.

  I’ve heard the snickering and the sarcasm all my life, and I’ve stopped apologizing and trying to explain and defending myself. It doesn’t bother me anymore. In fact, I invite it.

  The truth is, we dry-fly fishermen dress and talk and behave the way we do for the benefit of people like those two spin fishermen. We flaunt our expensive gear, our poetry, our aesthetics, our snobbery. We want to promote the image, to perpetuate the myth that we have the inside track on sportsmanship and that we choose to handicap ourselves with whippy little rods, flimsy tippets, tiny flies. We spurn mechanical aids like spinning reels and rely instead on timing and coordination and years of practice to put our flies near fish.

  If the people who laugh at us buy into this image, we’re happy, because we’ve got a secret, and already there are too many people who know it. The laugh’s on them.

  Here’s our secret: We dry-fly snobs like to catch fish at least as much as the next guy. Sportsmanship, tradition, artfulness, fancy equipment, and aesthetic values have nothing to do with it.

  We happen to know that any time trout are feeding on the surface, dry-fly fishing is the easiest, the deadliest—really, the only way to catch them. We can pinpoint the exact locations of specific feeding fish by their rise forms. We don’t have to guess what they’re eating, because we can see the bugs on the water, and we can with confidence tie on a fly that imitates those bugs. We can watch the way our fly drifts over our target fish. If we see him eat it, we lift our rod and catch him. If we see that he doesn’t eat it, we know that either the fly or the drift was wrong, and we know how to make corrections.

  There is no guesswork in dry-fly fishing. When trout are rising, they give us delicious, sometimes complicated, problems to solve. When we solve them, we can take full credit. Luck has nothing to do with it.

  That’s why we like it.

  I figured those two guys were watching me, so I did what any red-blooded dry-fly purist would do: I fumbled in my fly box and retied my tippet. I scooped up a rusty spinner, perched it on my fingertip, and whispered some Latin endearments to it. I tied on a fly, doused it with flotant, frowned at it, nipped it off, tied on another one. Made a couple of false casts. Moved upstream a few feet. Fumbled in my fly box.

  I played the role.

  After a few minutes, the two spin fishermen reeled in and headed back to their truck. Then I false cast once and dropped my fly over one of those dimpling trout, and as it lifted its head and sucked it in, I smiled and thought: You guys with your spinning gear who sneer at my snobbery, you’re the ones handicapping yourselves, throwing spinning lures at rising trout. You’re the true sportsmen. We dry-fly guys, we just down-and-dirty like to catch trout.

  I admit it. I was feeling pretty smug.

  I fished until it got too dark to see, by which time I’d caught seven or eight of those dimpling trout. Then I reeled up, waded out, and headed back for my car.

  When I climbed the bank by the bridge, a voice in the darkness said, “That was awesome, man.”

  Then I saw the glowing tips of their cigars. The two spinning guys were leaning their elbows on the bridge rail.

  I went over. “You’ve been watching me?” I said.

  “The whole time,” one of them said. “Wanted to see how it was done. I’ve always thought that fly fishing was so cool but figured it was too hard for an old dog to learn. You made it look easy.”

  �
�It is easy,” I said.

  “Looks like a lot of fun,” he said. “I gotta learn how to do that.”

  “Really?” I said. “You want to be a fly fisherman?”

  “Yeah. I always have.”

  “We’re terrible snobs, you know.”

  They both laughed as if they didn’t believe me.

  PART II

  COLD WATER

  The special thing about trout fishing with an imitative fly is that it is the only sport that proceeds from a general theory.… It goes like this: trout take the angler’s fly because it resembles a natural creature which they are accustomed to eating.

  —Datus Proper, What the Trout Said

  At any rate, men fish for trout for reasons which can only be defined in terms of romanticism. This being the case, it is not surprising that the methods of trout fishing incorporate both practical measures and those designed to be ritually symbolic of the proper degree of devoutness. This often tends to dismay the beginner, for as intended, it conveys the impression that trout fishing is extremely complex and difficult. Since the beginner cannot distinguish between necessity and affectation, he may be overwhelmed by their sum total.

  —Harold F. Blaisdell, The Philosophical Fisherman

  I caught my first trout at the age of six, while poaching a private mountain stream in West Virginia. It was a good five inches long, and weighed upward of an ounce. I might have caught a larger one, but the owner came by and suggested I scram. He let me keep the trout to prove my prowess to my parents, but on the way back to the hotel I lost it.

  —Ed Zern,To Hell with Fishing