Every Day Was Special

by William G. Tapply

  An afternoon of bluegill fishing almost forces you to blow out a long breath and smile. It’s important therapy for any angler, and I have Doc to thank for reminding me. Now that I’ve adjusted my thinking, I’ve come to believe that he might be right: The bluegill could be the perfect fish.

  Just Fishin’ with Uncle Ray

  I grew up in a Field & Stream family. My father wrote his “Tap’s Tips” and “Sportsman’s Notebook” columns for thirty-odd years for that magazine, and I fished and hunted with Dad and his fellow columnists Ed Zern and Corey Ford—and others who wrote for the magazine, like Lee Wulff, Harold Blaisdell, and Burton L. Spiller. I got my monthly fix of African adventure from Robert Ruark and angling instruction from Al McClane.

  Those are my roots. I had a filial devotion to Field & Stream, mainly because the demands of writing his monthly columns gave Dad an unassailable excuse to spend lots of time outdoors, and he was the kind of father who liked to bring his kid along. So the magazine indirectly subsidized my education as a fisherman and bird hunter.

  But like many kids of my generation, I devoured all the magazines. We were not parochial in my house. The treasures arrived monthly— Sports Afield and Outdoor Life, the other two members of the so-called “Big Three,” plus Argosy, True, Esquire, and Sports Illustrated, which always had a lot of hunting and fishing stuff in them, too.

  My father was … well, he was my father. I probably took him for granted, the way kids do. I guess I took Corey Ford and Ed Zern and Lee Wulff for granted, too. I saw them in their long johns, I lay awake in lakeside cabins listening to them snore, and I knew they sometimes got skunked, busted off fish, tied bad knots, and went in over their waders—important lessons for a boy. These men were good to me. They always treated me more or less as an equal. But I knew them too well to consider them heroes.

  I never met Ray Bergman, but I felt as if I knew him, too. I didn’t exactly think of him as a hero, either. He seemed way too down-to-earth and accessible. More like a favorite uncle. Probably because I never saw him in his long johns, he was my favorite outdoor writer of them all. When Outdoor Life arrived at our door, I grabbed it and went fishin’ with Uncle Ray.

  He wrote the way an uncle would talk to his favorite nephew— simply, gracefully, humbly, and wisely—and he didn’t sneer at worm fishing, which was my specialty in those days, or look down his nose at bluegills, horned pout, and perch, which were my most available quarry.

  Ray Bergman told stories, and he found lessons in every experience. He was scrupulous about getting the facts right, and he didn’t exaggerate. “In relating these incidents,” he wrote, “I have given only actual facts. There have been many times when the methods described… did not produce. These experiences, being failures, could not possibly contribute anything to angling knowledge unless the exact cause of failure were known and the experience related as a warning illustration. Fishermen are sometimes criticized for telling only of the times when certain lures produced. But usually such incidents are the only ones worth recounting. I simply don’t want you to believe that I always succeed. My failures, like those of most anglers, are legion.”

  You could trust Uncle Ray.

  “When I was a boy,” recalled Ray Bergman, “conditions were quite different from what they are today. I am old enough to have experienced the old-fashioned ways of the latter part of the nineteenth century and the rapid-fire progress of the twentieth. I saw the horse and carriage give way to the automobile, the dusty roads change rapidly from macadam to Tarvia and then to concrete. Each advance of progress had its effect on the fishing.”

  Bergman was born in 1891 and grew up in rural Nyack, New York, on the banks of the Hudson River, and by the time he was twelve he’d become a fanatical fisherman. “Being so closely attuned to nature’s whims,” he wrote, “I drifted naturally into out-of-door pursuits, and fishing seemed to be the one sport which best gratified that innate craving for an intimacy with those forces of which I knew so little. Is it any wonder that I made the study of fishing my life’s work?”

  From the beginning, Bergman kept detailed notes of his fishing experiences. It was a habit that he continued throughout his life. Those records led him to understandings he would write about, and they gave him the stories and anecdotes that entertained his readers and illustrated his points. “Remember that in the following incidents,” he wrote, “I am not trying to prove anything. They are simply accurate accounts of actual fishing experiences. If between them I wander into fanciful theory I hope the reader will forgive my mood, overlook it, and draw his own conclusions from the facts themselves.”

  He took note of every conceivable variable—weather and wind, time of day and year, phase of moon, condition of water, lures and baits that worked and failed, tactics and techniques, rods and reels, fish behavior and habits—and he was unique, at least for his time, in understanding that all of the variables needed to be factored into the complex angling equation.

  Ray Bergman fished for everything that swam in his Hudson Valley waters—trout, bass, pickerel, pike, salmon, lake trout, walleyes, panfish, even carp and suckers—and he made understanding all of them his “life’s work” long before he would ever get paid for it. He wrote with equal affection about all species of freshwater fish.

  Bass he found to be, in their own way, as challenging as trout. “In trout fishing,” he wrote, “practically all lines and methods of presenting them are designed with one objective in view: an appeal to the appetite of the fish. In fishing for bass we find that factors other than the desire for food must be considered.” He especially loved fishing for bass with popping bugs. “Surface lure angling is to me the acme of fishing, as judged by the amount of enjoyment derived, and in fly rod surface fishing for bass I find the most delicate and refined expression of bass fishing.”

  Bergman fished with bait and plugs and spinners and spoons, but he always had a special fondness for fly fishing. “No one in our territory ever used flies,” he recalled, “nor did they know anything about fly fishing. Even as recently as 1920, I doubt if there were more than six fly fishermen in our community.… I tried my best to get others interested in fly fishing but it was slow work.”

  When it was time to earn a living, he opened a sporting goods store—with a well-stocked fishing department—in his hometown of Nyack. Illness soon forced him to quit that business, and during his long recuperation, he began to write fishing articles. “I started writing,” he recalled in 1959 in “Ray Bergman Says Goodbye,” his last column for Outdoor Life, “simply because I loved fishing and wanted to share what I learned from my endless experiments with fishing tackle and tactics. Rather like a person airing his ideas through a letter to the editor, I typed out my first fishing story in 1921 and mailed it to the old Forest and Stream magazine. The story was published, and I have been writing similar stories ever since. All my writing has followed the same basic concept: to give the reader factual information gained and tested by my own practical experience, and to make it as interesting as my writing ability would allow.”

  He continued to write articles for the sporting magazines of the day for the next decade, and he published his first book in 1932. Just Fishin’ was an instant classic and went through many editions. Unlike most comprehensive angling books of that time, Just Fishin’ gave trout and bass equal space and revealed the fact that Bergman spent as much time fishing warm waters as he did wading trout streams. While he spurned no method that might catch fish, he often chose the fly rod when others in his party fished with bait or plugs, and he seemed to take special delight whenever his flies outfished their methods.

  Ray Bergman’s first fishing column for Outdoor Life appeared the next year, in 1933, and continued for twenty-six years, giving his readers more than three hundred visits with Uncle Ray. In between, he wrote two more classics: Trout (1938) and Fresh Water Bass (1942).

  In July of 1967, just five months after Ray Bergman’s death, my father received a letter from his friend Matthew Hodg
son, who was then an editor at Houghton Mifflin. “I have just had a note from Angus Cameron,” Hodgson wrote to Dad. “He seems interested in my idea of publishing an anthology of Ray Bergman’s best [Outdoor Life] pieces, edited by yourself.”

  My father, an admirer of Bergman, was eager to do the project, but the publishers of Field & Stream, for whom Dad was at the time a columnist, would not permit one of their writers to associate his name with a project involving one of their Big Three rivals. So Dad recommended his friend Ted Janes for the project, and in 1970, Fishing with Ray Bergman was published.

  Now, alas, all four Bergman books are out of print and hard to find. I treasure my copies. I dip into them often, and while technology has changed considerably since the days when Ray Bergman was writing, the fish—and the fishing—aren’t much different. I still find his stories as wise and as entertaining as I did half a century ago when I was a kid waiting for Outdoor Life to arrive in my mailbox.

  The Pig Boat

  Spinning reels, bass boats, fish-finders, plastic baits, and other high-tech equipment arrived in Tom Nixon’s part of Louisiana shortly after World War II, but he stuck to the fly rod. Not that he was a grumpy old traditionalist or any kind of fly-rod snob. “All I owned were a couple fly rods,” he told me shortly before he died in 2003, “and I couldn’t really afford new gear. Anyway, I’d always done okay with flies, and I can be pretty stubborn.”

  Nixon wanted to catch bass as much as the next guy, though, and he didn’t like getting outfished by his high-tech friends. “I was having to put up with a lot of guff from some of my heave-and-crank acquaintances about fly-rod bass,” he remembered, “how they should save their fish because the fly rod was unable to put anything into the pot. I will not bore you with all of the inconsiderate, meaningless and unjustified abuse that was heaped on my poor innocent head. But let me assure you, I was looking hard for something more productive to hang on my leader than the conventional fly baits of the time.”

  In 1951 Nixon responded to this challenge by inventing the Calcasieu Pig Boat, which was inspired by the Hawaiian Wiggler, a popular post-war, rubber-legged baitcasting lure. The Pig Boat resembled no “fly” anyone had ever seen. He named it after the Calcasieu River, his home bass water in southwestern Louisiana. The fly proved lethal on bass. Nixon likened it to a German submarine, which, he said, was “a deadly underwater predator” known during the Second World War as a “pig boat.”

  In fact, Tom Nixon’s Pig Boat should properly be regarded as nothing less than a revolutionary creation, a transitional design that liberated fly-rod bass fishing from the limitations of surface fishing with bugs and made it a legitimate sport for all water types and conditions. “Far too many capable and dedicated fishermen had wedded their fly rods to the cork body popping bug,” he wrote, “and when this combination failed to produce, they called it a day and went home.”

  The Pig Boat’s most prominent feature—dozens of wiggly rubber legs entirely encircling the body—makes it more of a lure than a fly. It was the first bass “bait” specifically designed to be cast and fished with the fly rod. Its body resembles a Woolly Worm—heavy black chenille wound over with thickly palmered grizzly hackle. From 56 to 72 strands of thin, black, rubber thread are tied as a collar in front.

  In your hand, a Pig Boat looks like a mating cluster of tarantulas. In the water, it wiggles and shimmies in ways that bass—and, in fact, most species of fish—cannot resist.

  In 1954, Harold F. Blaisdell’s Field & Stream story “Pig Boat on the Furnace” brought Nixon and his creation national attention. Blaisdell suspected that the Pig Boat would make an enticing mouthful for big predatory brown trout, and he proved it one evening on Furnace Brook, his local Vermont trout stream. “What puzzled me,” recalled Nixon tongue-in-cheekly, “was why anyone would waste a good bass bait on brown trout.… Mr. Blaisdell received a good bass bait and promptly let some old brown trout slobber all over it.”

  The original black-and-grizzly Pig Boat worked great most of the time. But Nixon didn’t stop there. Wrapping lead wire around the hook shank sank the fly down to water levels where bass sometimes lurked out of reach of an unweighted version. Clamping a spinner ahead of it added bass-attracting flash in murky water. Rigging it with an offset spinner converted the Pig Boat into a deadly fly-rod spinnerbait, while a 6-inch plastic worm split in half and trailed behind a Pig Boat made a lethal bass lure. When he discovered that impaling a pork rind on the hook sometimes caught more bass than an unfettered Pig Boat, Nixon tied in a sprig of white rubber threads as a pork-rind substitute and called it a “Sproat Boat.”

  He made them in different colors and sizes, and varied his retrieves according to weather and water conditions—deep and slow, fast and shallow, and even dead-drifted in lazy southern river currents.

  The effectiveness of his Pig Boat encouraged Nixon to experiment by fly casting with spin-fishing bass baits such as plastic worms, jig-n-pigs, and spinnerbaits. And then he devised “flies” that worked as well. In the process, he showed the way for present-day, fly-rod-casting bass gurus who no longer restrict themselves to floating bugs and whose repertoire of skills, tactics, and lures rivals that of the tournament champions. “A bass,” Nixon wrote, “is a far cry from the conventional target of the long rod. So, when the conventional concepts of tackle, lures and procedures fail to interest an unconventional quarry, go it his way.”

  Which is not to say that Tom Nixon ever turned up his nose at “conventional” flies. In fact, he invented dozens of more-or-less conventional flies and bugs and adapted countless old standards for southern largemouths and bream. All of them are proven fish-takers. He gave some of them delightful Cajun names—Sowela, Phideaux, Zeeke, Zombola, Maziere, Emida. Other names just seem to fit— Poofy, Big Sister, Shifty, Dog, Butcher.

  My personal favorite Nixon fly name is the .56%er. It’s a little weighted gray-and-yellow trout nymph that is also deadly for Cajun “brim”—and, same species, New England bluegills. Nixon observed that no trout dry-fly purist is really 100 percent pure. “A thorough analysis,” he noted slyly, “shows 99.44 percent to be the maximum degree of purity attainable, but they are 100 percent fishermen.… This scrawny-looking misfit of a fly was offered and accepted because no one could possibly blame a guy for trying one out in the upstream riffle. It would be obvious to any passerby that the angler was just filling out the remaining .56 percent of his total fishing capacity and could not be seriously accused of fishing. And by that number the fly became known.”

  Twenty-five years ago, when a local bass club invited Tom Nixon to participate in their tournaments on the Toledo Bend Reservoir on the Texas-Louisiana border, he accepted the chance to stack his fly rod up against their spinning and baitcasting gear. He entered five tournaments. “Got one first, one second, and two thirds,” he recalled. “The other one I got disqualified. We were camping out, and the alarm didn’t go off. Slept through the start.” He caught all of his tournament bass on two flies—most of them on a spinner-and-Pig-Boat rig (“for underwater”) and some on a yellow cork-body popping bug (“when I found ’em on top”).

  Tom Nixon was never much for philosophizing. But his love of fly tying and fly fishing for bass bubbled forth from his conversation, and it still does from his writing. “The easy grace of a fly rod,” he wrote in 1977, “the thrill it affords in playing and landing a fish, the casting accuracy that is accomplished, all of these things make the long rod one of the most sporting and pleasant ways to fish for bass.”

  PART IV

  SALT WATER

  To paraphrase Will Rogers, I never met a fish I did not like. But in the two main areas of my fly-fishing life—salt water and fresh water—there are distinct favorites. In fresh water it is trout. In the salt it is snook. None of the others comes close.

  —Norm Zeigler, Snook on a Fly

  I had never cast to a moving fish before, and the prospect of aiming flies at fast-swimming targets excited me. But my enthusiasm didn’t last long
. I soon found that I couldn’t see a single fish—I might as well have been fishing at midnight. And even if I had been able to spot one of those invisible phantoms, I would not have known what to do next.

  —Dick Brown, Fly Fishing for Bonefish

  The only difference between big-game fishing and collecting old millstones is that millstones aren’t slimy. In between fishing expeditions, big-game fishermen go around lifting Percheron horses off the ground and pulling loaded freight cars with their teeth. In the evening, they gather in small groups and feel each other’s muscle. Big-game anglers and fresh-water anglers sneer at each other. And why not?

  —Ed Zern, The Hell with Fishing

  First Light

  One morning many Junes ago, before saltwater fly fishing became ”the thing to do” in New England, Rip Cunningham, then the publisher and editor-in-chief of Saltwater Sportsman magazine, called me on the phone. “The stripers,” he said without prologue, “are all over the place down here.”

  “I’ve been hearing stories,” I said. “Figured it was a lot of exaggeration.”

  “The stories are true,” said Rip. “They’re back. It’s really quite awesome. They’re sloshing on the surface and cruising the mud flats at first light. You can see ’em pushing wakes in water barely up to your shins. Sometimes they tip up and wave their tails in the air. It’s like bonefishing. We’ve been catching lots of them. It’s all hunting and sight-fishing. Smallish flies, medium-weight rods. Stealth and cunning. Right up your alley. You’ve got to do this.”

  “What do you mean,” I said, “by lots?”