But, on a soft summer evening, I’m usually quite content to tie on something not much different from a strip-skin bob—a Henshall Bug, maybe, or a yellow Tap’s Bug. I’ll plop it near a fallen tree, watch the rings widen and dissipate before making it go ker-PLOOP, and wait for that sudden implosion of water. It reminds me that I am not that far removed from the Seminole Indians of the 17th century. I think it’s good for my soul to stay in touch with my roots.
14
Harm’s Way
Last summer I was chucking a floating damselfly imitation at some cruising brown trout on a Montana pond when, in the midst of a double-haul, my 4-weight sort of collapsed. When I stripped in my line, I saw that a foot of graphite rod tip had slithered down the line and gotten tangled with the fly.
The next day, drifting weighted stonefly nymphs on the Yellowstone, I hooked a medium-sized rainbow and my backup 4-weight snapped.
Two broken rods in two days. For the rest of the trip I had to use my back-up-back-up 3-weight, which was not designed to cast weighted stonefly nymphs and conehead bunny streamers in the Montana wind.
When I got home I called the manufacturer of the two broken rods (both came from the same maker). I had a tale of woe all prepared. It wasn’t my fault. I wasn’t doing anything wrong. I love my rods and always treat them like the very expensive pieces of fine-tuned machinery they are.
The woman on the other end of the line listened without comment and then asked for the rods’ serial numbers and my address. Two weeks later I had replacements for both rods, no charge, no questions asked.
I’m not complaining, but truthfully, it didn’t seem right. I was brought up to accept responsibility for what I did. If you broke a rod, you fixed it. A rod with a shortened tip never quite casts the same, of course. But you made do.
I started fishing when fly rods were all made from split bamboo. I broke a lot of rods when I was a kid. Screen doors and car doors slammed on them. They got stepped on and stubbed in the ground and caught in bicycle spokes. I always felt bad, but my father would just say, “Things break,” just like, when I was playing shortstop and bobbled a grounder, he’d say, “Errors are part of the game.”
One June afternoon Dad and I were trolling for rainbows on Walden Pond with his friend Lenox Putnam. Put was in the bow, Dad ran the motor from the stern, and I had the middle seat. We’d piled quite a lot of equipment into our little boat, and once we got underway Dad said, “Let’s get some of this stuff stowed out of harm’s way.”
Put laughed, leaned forward, and tapped my shoulder. “Hello, there, Harm,” he said.
Dad thought that was pretty funny, and for several years thereafter I was known among my father’s fishing companions as Harm.
* * *
My first fly rod was an 8½-foot 3-piece Montague, complete with cloth sleeve and aluminum tube, a Christmas present when I was ten. I know now that it was a cheap, mass-produced stick, but I thought it was gorgeous. I spent the next four months setting it up and waving it around and running my fingertips over its smooth varnished finish.
At sunrise on the third Saturday of the following April, I was sprinting down the sloping path to my Opening Day trout pond with my brand-new Montague, all strung up with an Eagle Claw hook and a cork-stopper bobber in one hand and a can of freshly-dug worms in the other, when a tree branch reached out, snagged my rod, and splintered the tip section.
Instead of crying, my first impulse, I disjointed the broken tip, and when I got to the pond, I used the butt and middle sections of my new Montague to muscle my baited hook into the water. Caught a couple of pale hatchery brookies, too.
When I got home, I had to tell my father that I’d broken my new rod before I ever got to fish with it. He seemed more pleased with the fact that I’d improvised with two-thirds of a rod than upset that I’d busted it.
Then he told me how it worked: “You break it, you fix it.”
And so I learned how to splice and glue and wrap splintered bamboo, how to space and attach running guides and tiptops, how to steel-wool, burnish and revarnish the finish.
I’d like to report that I also learned not to run in the woods carrying a strung-up fly rod. But the fact is, Harm has been breaking things all his life.
* * *
I grew up in a time—or at least in a household—where you took responsibility for your gear, and in a nostalgic, irrational sort of way, I sometimes think of that time as the Good Old Days.
Compared to today, our equipment was clunky. Waders were made of heavy canvas. When they sprang leaks, you used a flashlight in a dark room to find the holes and then you patched them with a bicycle-tube repair kit. You hung them upside down to dry (you could make a good wader-hanger by bending a pair of coat hangers and nailing them to the wall) so they wouldn’t rot.
The early nylon fly lines got tacky and kinky if you didn’t strip them out onto a newspaper to dry after every day of fishing. If the line’s finish cracked, you soaked it in a 50-50 mixture of boiled linseed oil and spar varnish. You had to be able to splice sections of line together and whip loops onto the ends to keep them serviceable year after year. It would never occur to you to throw away an old fly line.
I learned how to mix my own insect repellent (a mixture of citronella, oil of cedar, camphor, pennyroyal oil, petroleum jelly, and pine tar) and dry-fly floatant (paraffin dissolved in lighter fluid). Mineral oil made a good fly-line dressing. I learned leader formulas and knots, because they hadn’t yet invented knotless tapered leaders.
I learned how to take apart, clean, and oil my reels. I sharpened my hooks, polished my spinners and spoons, and made my own sinkers (pour molten lead into holes you’ve gouged into the flat side of half a potato). I had dozens of uses for paperclips, safety pins, and bobby pins.
I tied my own flies because the only place I could buy them was the hardware store, which stocked only snelled wet flies. Mail-order and on-line options didn’t exist. As far as I knew, Stoddards in Boston was the only store in Massachusetts that sold a legitimate assortment of flies, and it took half a day riding a bus and then a train to get there, even if I had some money. So I scavenged road kill (woodchuck, squirrel and raccoon, mainly) for their hair. I saved all the feathers from the pheasants, woodcock, grouse and ducks that I shot, and I snuck over to Bob Allen’s chicken coop next door and plucked feathers from his rooster’s neck. I learned how to dye bucktails and feathers. I filched yarn and scraps of wool from my mother’s knitting basket. I made flash from Christmas tree tinsel and aluminum foil. I tied flies from the materials I had, and if I didn’t have some ingredient I needed, I used something else.
Like rod and wader repairing and caring for equipment and making the stuff you couldn’t buy, fly tying was an essential skill for a fly fisherman back then. Being an angler involved a lot of time-consuming and fussy work. I don’t remember getting any particular sense of satisfaction from doing it all myself. That’s just the Way It Was.
I love breathable waders and tapered knotless leaders and the myriad fly-tying materials and the wonderfully useful doodads you can buy with a credit card and a few clicks of a mouse these days. I’m certainly not complaining about full-replacement-no-questions-asked rod warranties, either.
Whenever I’m tempted to wax nostalgic about the Good Old Days, as I increasingly am, I remind myself that back then cesspools spewed domestic sewage directly into the Upper Connecticut River, festooning the bushes along the banks with strips of toilet paper. Effluent from textile factories ran the Nashua River bright red or green or purple, depending on what day of the week it was. In those days a creel or a fish stringer was essential equipment. Nobody practiced catch and release. There was no such thing as sunscreen, although skin cancer had already been invented. There were no magazines devoted to fly fishing, never mind Saturday-morning cable TV shows or instructional videos.
My father wrote books and magazine articles about how to make and fix and improvise stuff for fishing. But he was above all else a Yankee
pragmatist. He believed in progress. He liked to say, “These right here are the Good Old Days.” He embraced the new carefree fly lines and knotless leaders and breathable waders, and he was happy to buy bug dope and dry-fly repellent that worked way better than the concoctions he made. He reminded me that the trout fishing on the Upper Connecticut had never been better, and that largemouth bass were thriving in the once dead Nashua.
When fiberglass came along, my father simply stopped using bamboo rods. “Fiberglass rods are lighter and cast better,” he said, and, with an elbow nudge to my ribs, he added, “and they’re practically unbreakable, so you don’t have to keep them out of Harm’s way.”
15
Toy Rods
When you go striper or steelhead fishing with Fred Jennings, the first thing you notice is that he catches way more fish, and bigger fish, than you do. If you watch him closely, you see that he casts farther than you do, with less false casting and with less apparent effort in general, even in the wind, and he muscles his fish in more efficiently and releases them more quickly than you do.
Then you notice his fly rod. It’s a six-foot, two-weight wand. A mere toy. And you wonder what this man is trying to prove.
He’s happy to talk about it.
WGT: Everybody knows that you need a long, stiff rod to fight big fish and bring them in before they—and you—are utterly exhausted. You seem to do fine—okay, you do great—with your baby rod, but couldn’t you fight and land your fish even better with a man-sized rod?
FJ: It seems to be an unquestioned assumption that the use of light tackle kills fish because one must baby them far too much. This is something I know to be wrong. The myth that one needs long stiff rods and heavy lines for big fish has been very destructive.
WGT: Huh? A myth? Destructive?
FJ: What people don’t seem to realize when they denigrate my use of light tackle because it “kills the fish” by playing them too long is that I land my fish faster than almost anyone else I fish with. What determines how hard you can pull on a fish has absolutely nothing to do with the weight of the line that you are hurling into the air. It has to do with tippet strength and the design of the rod.
WGT: So this short-rod stuff isn’t some romantic affectation?
FJ: No. It’s physics. When my 6-foot 2-weight rod is bent hard into a fish, for a given torque at my wrist (in foot-pounds), more than half of that goes to the line tension, because the “effective length” of my rod when bent that way is somewhat less than two feet. So for 20 foot-pounds, I am putting more than 10 pounds of tension on the line itself where it comes out of the rod tip going out to the fish. With the friction of the water, that is all one would ever want to exert, at least on a 15-pound tippet and a crashing fish, and that’s living dangerously. Understand?
WGT: Well, sort of. You’re saying a short rod is more efficient than a long one?
FJ: Absolutely. Consider the same situation with a 9 foot 8- weight rod. Here, an exertion of 20 foot-pounds at the lower end of the rod involves about 7 feet of rod in terms of “effective length” once bent, which yields less than one-third the tension at the rod tip on the line, namely just under 3 pounds of tension. So, to pull 10 pounds of tension at the rod tip (assuming 3 feet is lost to the bend with this heavier pull), one must exert 60 foot-pounds of torque at the handle instead of only 20. When I am fighting a very large fish, I pull as hard as my hand and arm strength allow, often with the reel braced against my forearm or my midriff. I am getting more tension for the amount of effort expended than someone with a long stiff rod. This means that I can bring a fish in faster due to better leverage than anyone with a long rod.
WGT: I’m not sure I followed all that, but it sounds impressive. It’s all about leverage, huh?
FJ: Leverage is a big part of it, sure. But when it comes to fighting big fish, the real advantage of a light short rod is its incredible sensitivity. You can feel every move a fish makes during a fight, and most especially on a big fish. You can feel what the fish is doing. You can tell when it’s about to run, and you can anticipate it and stop it by putting on some pressure at those moments. The big sticks don’t have anywhere near the sensitivity of my short light rods, nor are they anywhere near as much fun to fight a fish on.
WGT: I’ve seen how efficiently you land and release your fish after you get them in. You want me to believe the short rod helps here, too?
FJ: You bet. When landing a fish with the longer rods, you have almost no control of that fish. If you can use a net or a gaff and you tire the fish out enough, then you can control it because it’s exhausted. But the fish I bring in on my short rods are still green and agile when I release them.
WGT: There must be some technique to it.
FJ: Right. With a short rod, I bring in the line until I have only about two feet or less of leader left outside the rod tip, and then even a pretty wild fish can be controlled very well. The thing to remember is to extend your rod hand all the way out from your body. Otherwise you will “candy-cane” the rod and break it. That position allows you to bend the length of the short rod over your head, so the fish comes in on the other side of you under tight control. From here, run your hand down the leader either to the fly or to the lower jaw of the fish. Grabbing the line on big fish is a great mistake and will often cost you a fly.
WGT: Okay, but surely your baby rod seriously handicaps your casting. You don’t look that strong . . .
FJ: You’re right. My arms aren’t very strong. That’s precisely why I like short rods. They’re much easier to cast without getting tired. A very short rod gives you much higher line speed. The advantage is that you can use a lighter line in the wind and it moves faster through the air than it does with a longer rod. Short light rods cannot be powered through a cast. You need to use timing and grace, not power. I’m always surprised at how many people used to big long rods simply cannot cast at all with my short light ones. They try to power the rod and that just doesn’t work.
WGT: I have to admit that you seem to cast farther with your little wand than I do with my man-sized rod.
FJ: I am always surprised when I fish with people using long heavy rods and find that I am casting about 10–20 feet farther than they are. I would agree, however, that you can cast farther with long rods than you can with shorter ones if you don’t have much skill. The long rods are slower so the timing is not as critical. But, once you learn how to cast a light short rod, it is so much easier that, when you go back to the big rod, it just feels like a club.
WGT: Hm. Skill, huh?
FJ: I didn’t necessarily mean you. But if the shoe fits.
WGT: What about casting in the wind? Surely your flimsy little stick handicaps you there?
FJ: Au contraire. Casting into wind with long rods and heavy, fat-diameter lines puts more stress on your arm and requires more work. The longer the rod, the more slowly the line moves through the air, and heavy lines are more wind resistant. To beat a stiff wind, go short and use light lines. Also, when you cast short rods in the wind, the line is down nearer the water where the wind doesn’t blow as hard.
WGT: I notice you use a shooting head. How important is the way you rig up?
FJ: After a lot of trial and error, I’ve developed a rig that works beautifully with my short, light rods. I use a 30-foot shooting head, flat mono running line, and a ten-foot fifteen pound leader for stripers. I usually fish with weighted flies like Clousers. There are many advantages to this rig. The flat mono shoots like a dream When I get to the flyline in my retrieve I know it’s time to pick up and cast, and when I’m on my game I can throw a cast with only one false-cast, thus keeping my fly in the water for a maximum amount of time. Another nice feature of this rig is that it maximizes the amount of backing I can wind onto the small reels that balance the little rods.
WGT: Thanks for sharing your secrets.
FJ: I don’t have any secrets. I want people to understand. I’d like to debunk the conventional wisdom about big rods being better
and more sportsmanlike. I really believe that folks will have more fun—and catch more fish—using short, light rods. This prejudice against these rods deprives anglers of a great deal of pleasure. I’ve seen the delight people get from fighting big fish on light rods again and again when I’ve put one of my outfits in their hands.
PART IV
Fly Fishing Here and There
“There is no use in your walking five miles to fish when you can depend on being just as unsuccessful near home.”
—Mark Twain
“The wildness and adventure that are in fishing still recommend it to me.”
—Henry David Thoreau, Walden
“I fish all the time when I’m at home; so when I get a chance to go on vacation, I make sure I get in plenty of fishing.”
—Thomas McGuane, An Outside Chance
16
Porcupine Brook
I happened upon Porcupine Brook while exploring some promising woodcock cover last October. Burt, my Brittany, had wandered off, as he often does, and when I could no longer hear his bell, and he refused to come when I yelled at him, I had to go looking for him.
I found him stretched out on point in an alder thicket on the other side of a little winding brook. When I jumped across so I could kick up Burt’s woodcock, several quick shadows darted across the sandy bottom.
I missed the woodcock, of course. A little farther along Burt pointed again, and I missed again, which is how he and I generally do it. No matter. It looked like we’d found ourselves a nice woodcock cover.
Trout Eyes Page 9