I did as I was told. I checked the ferrules of the 8-weight, thumbnailed the point of the chartreuse Wiggler, stripped line off the reel, made a 50-foot cast, coiled the line on the deck, and pinched the fly by the bend of the hook. Locked and loaded.
I adjusted my sunglasses, tugged the brim of my hat, and felt the familiar surge of sight-fishing adrenaline zing through my veins. There’s nothing like it.
Ben poled us slowly along the edge of the drop-off, both of us squinting hard at the water, and pretty soon he said, “There. Eleven o’clock. Nervous water. See the wakes?”
I saw them. It looked like three of four fish, and they were meandering along in our direction.
I got the line moving with one false cast and dropped the Wiggler about 5 feet ahead of the front wake. Perfect.
Ben laughed.
I started to ask him what was so funny. Then I saw what he was seeing. Dark shapes were zipping past us. They looked like 2-foot torpedoes. Spooked redfish. Dozens of fish. Hundreds, maybe. They left little spurts of mud in their wake. It took a couple of minutes for all of them to zoom past our boat.
“Big school,” said Ben. “Your fly landed right in the middle of them. Spook one, you spook ’em all.”
“Nuts,” I said, or something similar.
“They’ll be back,” he said. “This is where they want to be. They’re moving back and forth along this shelf where the food is. We’ll wait.”
“What I’ve read about redfishing,” I said, “it’s casting to tailing fish on the flats, like bonefish.”
“ We get that on the big full-moon tides, late spring and summer,” Ben said. “Around here they call them tailing tides. They flood the grass flats, and the reds swarm all over them. It’s a blast. Singles and pairs eating shrimp and fiddler crabs with their pretty tails waving hello. I love that. But the fall is a great time, too. They start podding up in shallow bays in September. You’ll see schools of ten or fifteen fish. Around now, in November, we’ve got schools like this one we just spooked, fifty or a hundred fish, and by January there’ll be three, four, even five hundred fish in a school. We have great sight-fishing with flies right through the winter. Cold weather in December and January puts them off their feed, but on warm, sunny days—and we have plenty of them in the winter—you’ll find reds in shallow water eating shrimp and baitfish, and the only trick is not to spook them. Reds are spooky fish. Spook just one redfish in a school and they all explode.”
“Like those just did,” I said.
“Right. So don’t shuffle your feet or make any quick moves. Don’t even talk. Look down into the water, spot the fish, and don’t bang your fly on their heads.”
Ben eased us away from the shelf, and pretty soon we saw some fish meandering along, headed back to where they’d come from. I managed to drop my fly on the edge of the school, let it sink, twitched it a couple of times, and felt a hard tug. I tightened on him, felt his strength, lifted my rod.
Oh, yeah.
Catching redfish out of a pothole on mud minnows and spinning gear was fun. Call me a snob, but catching sighted reds on flies was way better.
We harassed that big school of redfish for about two hours before the tide bottomed out and they disappeared. We caught some, hooked others, missed several strikes. They ran from about 20 to 24 inches long—hard-pulling 5-pounders, more or less, and we spotted many larger fish (30 inches and better) in the school. We spooked them a few times and waited for them to return while the late-November Carolina sun warmed our shoulders and the scent of sea and salt and marshgrass filled our nostrils.
On the way back to the marina we stopped to play hide-and-seek with some dolphins. High overhead, bald eagles soared. We saw pelicans and herons, loons and hawks, cormorants and ducks, gulls and terns.
Everything but other fishermen. We never saw another boat until we got back to the marina.
Daisy-Chain Blues
When my father was a young man living and working in New England, he caught striped bass and weakfish (seatrout, which he called “squeteague”) on his bamboo fly rod, casting from a dory into the harbors and estuaries of Massachusetts and Rhode Island.
By the time I became a young man, the stripers and weakfish were pretty much gone from New England onshore waters. For me, fly fishing was a freshwater activity. Not that I had any complaints.
I did fish the edge of the Atlantic from big oceangoing boats owned by various friends wealthier than I. We went out sometimes beyond sight of land, and we trolled spoons and plugs from rods as thick as my thumb, and we caught bluefish. Tons of bluefish, literally.
When I visited Joe Nies at his vacation place on Nantucket in the summer, we lugged his hibachi, a bag of charcoal, and a couple of surf rods out onto Cisco Beach toward evening on incoming tides. We got the coals started, then sat on the sand to wait for the schools of blues to come blitzing along. There was no sense casting blindly into the ocean, but when we saw the patch of swirling, spurting water and the panicky leaping baitfish moving down the surfline toward us, we jogged to the edge of the beach and cast plugs into the midst of the frenzy. We never had any problem catching them whenever we found them, although beaching a blue was never easy. It fought like a fish twice its size. It leaped and slogged and took off on long runs, and when you finally backed it onto the sand, its mouth would begin darting and thrashing sideways, slashing at anything it could reach, like an ankle or a thumb.
When the school got close, we could see the blues hacking and slicing away at the schools of bait. They left the water bloody. They killed wantonly. Sometimes they were so frantic that they knocked our lures into the air. Killing and eating seemed to be two different activities for bluefish.
The first fish Joe or I caught each evening got filleted and slapped instantly onto the hibachi. There has never been a fish as delicious as a 5-pound bluefish direct from the surf to the charcoal grill, still twitching.
Blues were violent, vicious, powerful fish with teeth you quickly learned to avoid. A bluefish was known as “the mouth that swims,” and it never occurred to me that you could—or would want to try to—catch one on a fly rod.
It was Mike Hintlien, guiding Andy Gill and me from his boat along the Massachusetts North Shore, oh, twenty-odd years ago, who introduced me to fly-rod bluefish. By this time the striped bass had begun to return to our coastal waters, and it was the stripers that we sought. We cast shooting heads toward the surf crashing against the rocky shorelines, and I made the acquaintance of the striped bass.
But sometimes something else took my deep-running Clouser or Deceiver. “Big one,” I’d grunt when I felt the pull.
Mike would know right away. “Bluefish,” he’d say. Usually my line came slack a minute later. “Bit you off.”
“Big blue,” I’d say.
“Probably not,” Mike would say. “Probably smaller than those stripers you’ve been catching. Stronger is all.”
When the stripers were elusive, Mike would motor away from the shoreline and tell us to rig up with some wire and a big green-and-white Deceiver. He’d stop the boat in some apparently random place out of sight of land and take out a spinning outfit. It was armed with a big popper minus the hooks. Mike would cast it way the hell out there and chug it back, making it throw water, and pretty soon a patrol of bluefish would come slashing away at it. When Mike had lured the fish within casting distance, Andy and I would throw our Deceivers out amidst the frenzy, and pretty soon we’d each be tied to a bluefish.
It was pretty exciting. There was something primitive about it—about the way we went about catching them, and about the fish themselves—and you wouldn’t want to do it all day. In fact, we never specifically went fly fishing for blues. Whenever we fished with Mike, we were after stripers. But for an hour or so, catching trolled-up bluefish on 8-weight fly rods sure beat casting into empty water.
It was around that time that I met Vicki. She was managing a SCUBA shop and writing for a dive magazine. She was passionate about diving,
the way I was about fly fishing. I told her right off that I had no intention of ever putting my head underwater and trying to breathe, which I think disappointed her, but she was quite interested in trying fly fishing, my passion.
After a few awkward “lessons,” she decided that she should learn to cast from somebody other than I. So she enrolled in a weekend class at the L. L. Bean school up in Freeport, Maine.
When she got home, she said, “Hey! I can cast.” She said she’d also learned some stuff about bugs, and they’d shown her how to tie a Duncan Loop. “But you can forget that,” she said. “I’m not interested in knots. Anyway, John, my teacher, he wants to take us fishing.”
“Us,” I said. “You mean you.” Vicki was pretty cute. I could understand why a fly-fishing instructor might want to take her fishing.
“No, really,” she said. “I told him about you. He said he wanted to meet you. He said he had a special place to show you. Us. So we’re meeting him Tuesday morning. Okay?”
“A special place, huh? Did he indicate what kind of special?”
She shrugged. “He said something about bluefish. He said to bring an 8- or a 9-weight fly rod and some big saltwater flies. He used the word ‘unique.’”
We met John at a gas station on the outskirts of Bath. An aluminum dory with a small outboard hooked on the transom was trailered behind his wagon. Vicki and I transferred our gear and piled in.
He drove through city streets and suburban neighborhoods, over country roads and, briefly, onto the interstate. I smiled. I knew what he was doing. “I wasn’t planning on writing about it,” I said to him.
He just smiled.
We launched John’s boat somewhere in or near the estuary of the Kennebec River, and he putted among the boulders and small islands and half-exposed clam flats and patches of beach. Some of the boulders were covered with basking seals. They honked at us as we went past.
After fifteen or twenty minutes, John cut toward the jumbled rockpiles that marked the ragged shoreline, and then he slid through an opening between two house-sized boulders. The portal was narrow and tucked behind one of the tall gateway rocks. You wouldn’t see it if you didn’t know it was there.
We found ourselves on a round glassy pond just a few hundred yards in diameter. It felt utterly isolated. Alien, even. It was the kind of place you didn’t want to spoil by talking.
John cut the motor, and we drifted over the pond on the breath of a soft breeze. Then he hissed, “There! Look.”
He was standing in the stern pointing with his oar.
I tugged down the visor of my cap and looked. Then I saw it. A fish. A large grayish-green fish … no, wait. Two fish. No, there were more than that. Slowly swimming past our bow in single file was a long line of fish, and as my eyes adjusted, I saw that it was a full circle of fish, an endless line. A daisy chain of large bluefish circling, circling, head to tail. And they were passing about 60 feet in front of us.
I turned to Vicki. “Want to try to catch one?”
She shook her head. “I can’t cast that well. Besides, those fish are scary. You do it.”
I glanced at John, and he nodded.
I tried to remember what I’d read about casting to daisy-chaining tarpon. Don’t bring the fly directly at the fish. Tarpon aren’t used to being attacked by baitfish. Not that it should matter. These were blues. My whole experience with bluefish taught me that they’d try to kill anything that they saw.
I cast flies at those daisy-chaining blues for at least half an hour without sparking any interest whatsoever. I tried big flies and small flies, green and blue and white and red flies. I tried poppers and Clousers and Deceivers.
And then, for no apparent reason, one of them peeled off, swam up behind my little yellow Deceiver, followed it for several feet, then opened his mouth and sucked it in, just the way a striper—or a tarpon—would do.
It weighed 14 pounds, 3 ounces on John’s Boga-Grip. It’s still by far my biggest-ever fly-rod bluefish.
By the time we released that fish, the daisy chain had dropped out of sight. We waited and cruised around the pond, but it never reappeared.
When the tide turned later in the afternoon, a school of small stripers came into our pond, and Vicki showed me how John had taught her to cast, which was quite well indeed. She caught a bunch of schoolies on poppers, which made all three of us happy.
PART V
SOME FLIES
I want to know what I’m doing. I’d like to know the name of every insect (and tree, rock, flower, and mermaid), but I don’t. Without a name, I can’t look up an imitation. I can see how the natural fly is behaving, though, and pick one from a fly box that behaves likewise. If it is the right size, it will probably work. If it is also the right shape, it may work better than an imitation from a book. Design does not have to be more complicated than that.
—Datus Proper, What the Trout Said
Throughout these two seasons I used only one dry-fly pattern, regardless of what fly was hatching, without ever making an effort to match the hatch. Yet I think I caught as many trout as I ever did in two seasons …
—H. G. Tapply, The Sportsman’s Notebook
There’s alleged to be an extra satisfaction involved in catching trout on flies of one’s own manufacture, but I’ve never noticed it. I tie my own flies because it keeps me out of mischief on long winter evenings and results in better flies than I can get from commercial sources. Also it enables me to invent all sorts of new patterns with which to confound the traditionalists and standpatters. (I doubt if the fly has ever been tied that was too freakish or fraudulent to take fish under certain conditions—and there are times when only the freak is effective. At least, I can’t recall ever seeing a hatch of natural Fanwing Royal Coachmans.)
—Ed Zern, To Hell with Fishing
The Mongrel Bugger
We pushed onto the inky Bighorn from the ramp at Three Mile. A layer of pre-dawn mist ghosted over the water. The stars were just beginning to wink out, and the August sky had begun to fade from black to pewter. The PMD hatch waited a few river miles and several hours in front of us. Now it was streamer-throwin’ time, and I’d won the toss.
“Black Bugger,” ordered Bill from his seat at the oars.
“Mmm,” I answered in what was intended to imply agreement without committing me to it.
I sat in the bow seat with my back to Bill and opened my streamer box on my knees. Bill Rohrbacher had been guiding on the Bighorn since the Crows lost their court fight, and he was on a first-name basis with every 20-inch trout that lived there. He could sniff the air and predict what was going to hatch, and how soon. I’d learned not to argue with him.
But nobody tells me what streamer to fish with.
I made my choice, tied it on, stood up, and began casting. Slap it just below that rock, lower the rod tip, strip, strip, strip. Lift, one false cast, sidearm it under the sweeper, strip, strip. Cover the water. Hit the targets. Throwin’ streamers for big trout at dawn from the bow of a driftboat is mesmerizing, rhythmical, and altogether engrossing.
It’s also a pretty good way to catch fish. I nailed my first trout— a standard-run 18-inch Bighorn brown—across from Snag Hole. Another whacked my streamer by the auto bodies, and by the time Bill beached the driftboat on the island below Teepee, I’d taken two more, including a rainbow that pushed 21 inches.
He leaned on his oars. “Pretty interesting,” he said. “Not a single short hit. Usually you get half a dozen follows and swirls and refusals for every hookup.”
“Masterful angling, obviously,” I said.
“Expert guiding, more likely. Anyway, we’ll see. It’s my turn. Come grab these oars. Gimme your rod and let a real master have a shot.”
We swapped seats. I pushed us into the currents and had begun to nose into casting distance from the bank when Bill roared, “What in hell is this?”
He was holding my streamer between his thumb and forefinger as if it were dangerous.
“Oh,
that?” I said. “I don’t know what it’s called. I invented it. It’s a little of this, a little of that.”
“It ain’t exactly a black Bugger.”
“Nope. Not exactly.”
“I thought I told you to tie on a black Woolly Bugger.”
I shrugged.
He lowered the fly into the water and moved it back and forth. “It is similar,” he mumbled. “Sort of a Muddler, too, though. A damn mongrel, that’s what it is.”
And that’s what we decided to call it. The Mongrel Bugger.
It came out of my fly-tying vise one day-dreamy Sunday afternoon in February when the low-angled slants of the winter sun glinted off the new snow outside my window and an inch of Rebel Yell Kentucky bourbon stood in a tumbler by my elbow, and a warm summer breeze blew through my fishing-starved imagination.
I’d like to report that the Mongrel Bugger resulted from years of experimentation and refinement. I wish I’d planned it.
But on winter afternoons, I don’t plan much of anything. When I sit at my fly-tying desk, I don’t give a lot of thought to what I’m going to tie. I go with the Zen of it. I’m always curious to see what will happen.
On that particular February afternoon, I clamped a No. 4 streamer hook in my vise, watched a cardinal eat a sunflower seed from the birdfeeder, tied dumbbell eyes onto the front of the hook, sipped some Rebel Yell, wound back to the bend, and rummaged in my desk.
Marabou? Okay. I made a tail. It was beginning to look alarmingly like a Woolly Bugger, and damned if I was going to follow someone else’s recipe.
A blue jay chased the cardinal away.
I thought about streamers. The classic landlocked salmon featherwings and bucktails I learned to tie by rote as a kid—the Warden’s Worry, the Grey Ghost, the Dark Tiger, the Supervisor, the Nine-Three, the Mickey Finn. I still had drawers full of them. Relics. Never used them anymore.
Every Day Was Special Page 14