The Founding Fish (27 page)
Authors: John McPhee
I made that dart with the lead wrapping from the neck of a bottle of wineâa messy, inadvisable process with highly impure metal, but I could not resist the idea. You heat up the lead in an electric pot and pour it into a mold in which you have first set a No. 2 O'Shaughnessy hook. A machinist in rural Pennsylvania fashioned the mold in his basement. It makes only one dart at a time, but perfectlyâthe head guillotined flat. The painting takes me several weeks, because I've got other things to do, also because I want time to pass between coatsâthe white undercoat, the two color coats, and then a dip of the head in a differing color. In a fly-tying vise, you tie on the bucktail at the tip of the cone. You seal the tie with head cement.
Essentially all shad darts are homemade. If you don't make your own, you buy darts that someone made at home. Scattered tackle shops make them on the premises. Behind the cash register,
waiting for customers, the owner kills his day wrapping bucktail. Most tackle shops get their darts from nearby residents. The quality of shad darts is therefore as varied as the quality of organic fruit. Some darts that look beautiful lose their paint on the first rock they hit. Most look as if they were painted by someone watching television. Darts are sufficiently idiosyncratic to be traceable to the zip code where they were sold. A friend of mine likes to swim in the river with fins and face mask, picking up lost darts. He hooks them into his T-shirt until it weighs so much he almost drowns. He throws away the shirt and keeps the darts. On this planet, there may be fewer languages than varieties of shad dart.
waiting for customers, the owner kills his day wrapping bucktail. Most tackle shops get their darts from nearby residents. The quality of shad darts is therefore as varied as the quality of organic fruit. Some darts that look beautiful lose their paint on the first rock they hit. Most look as if they were painted by someone watching television. Darts are sufficiently idiosyncratic to be traceable to the zip code where they were sold. A friend of mine likes to swim in the river with fins and face mask, picking up lost darts. He hooks them into his T-shirt until it weighs so much he almost drowns. He throws away the shirt and keeps the darts. On this planet, there may be fewer languages than varieties of shad dart.
I would be unforthcoming if I did not tell you that my darts are terrific-looking darts. Their colors are bright and sharply defined. If my darts were for sale, I'd be cleaned out. Their durability is as high as their gloss. Yet for quality, consistency, appearance, and allure, it is an adventure in pretension even to allude to them on the way to further discussion of the shad darts of Armand Charest.
When he was a kid in Holyoke, Massachusetts, fishing off the Willimansett Bridge, shad darts were unknown to him. He used brass spoons, and spinner blades with beads. Hand over hand, he lifted the shad from the river and pulled them thrashing all the way up to the roadway, never mind that his line could have lifted a mako shark.
His forebears were French, Scottish, Micmac, and Malecite. His father was a loom fixer. Armand's grammar school was Precious Blood, his high school Holyoke Trade. He was trained as a linotype operator in an era when a linotype operator was soon to be as current as a tailor of chain mail. He became a wire-strander operator at a manufacturing plant in South Hadley, a job he held until an industrial accident led to his retirement at the age of thirty-five. He did not stop fishing.
He bought his first shad darts in a barbershop. He bought
them also in Ma's Bait Shop. He couldn't find a good one anywhere. The paint was dull. The paint came off. The adhesion of the paint is fundamental: a shad dart relates to bedrock as a basketball relates to the floor. Charest thereforeâin the middle nineteen-eighties-began to make his own darts. Selecting paints, he began with lacquers and was later drawn to “glo-in-the-dark” vinyls. That first year, he made four hundred darts and went shad fishing in the Connecticut River, leaving darts in a box on the bank behind him, with a sign: “3 for $1.”
them also in Ma's Bait Shop. He couldn't find a good one anywhere. The paint was dull. The paint came off. The adhesion of the paint is fundamental: a shad dart relates to bedrock as a basketball relates to the floor. Charest thereforeâin the middle nineteen-eighties-began to make his own darts. Selecting paints, he began with lacquers and was later drawn to “glo-in-the-dark” vinyls. That first year, he made four hundred darts and went shad fishing in the Connecticut River, leaving darts in a box on the bank behind him, with a sign: “3 for $1.”
The following year, he made eleven hundred darts and sold them out of his tackle box in a single weekend. For the next season, he made three thousand darts. Selling them, he moved aroundâfrom the South Hadley Cove to the dam tailrace to the rapids above the Willimansett Bridge to the Chicopee boat launch to the bottom of Granby Road. He stopped at the waterwheels of Holyokeâthe industrial-power-canal outlets that attract fish. He sold darts at Gas House, Valley Paper, Crocker A-B. Across the river, at the South Hadley boat launch, he parked his Toyota with the tailgate open and a card table beside it displaying his wares. Naturally, the scene attracted police. They told him he needed a Massachusetts hawker-and-peddler's license. He got one, but governments were not through with him. Enter the Internal Revenue Service. If you sell fishing lures, you must have a federal tax ID. Did he have an ID number? No? Really? Had he been selling shad darts in the previous fiscal year? The year before that? For some time, he paid the IRS twenty-five dollars a week.
Charest's darts, with their shifting levels and colors, are like the stratigraphic miniatures of Paul Klee. I would have thought it took him hours to make just one, but visiting his house in South Hadley a couple of years ago I learned that he could give a coat of paint to sixteen hundred darts in ninety minutes. He had added dimension to the term cottage industry. We ranged from second floor to basement in a house that was essentially a workshop.
Striper jigs were drying on the second floor among rods he was making and rods in for repair. The living-room couch was the workbench where he and his wife, Denise, would sit side by side in the evenings with racks of darts before them, tying their own blend of Flashabou and Polarflash in lieu of bucktail. In the basement, though, was the machine that had put this whole operation into a class by itself. Consisting of tricycle wheels, bicycle chains, hexagonal nuts, and threaded lengths of stiff wire, it would not have looked amiss beside an orrery. Functionally, it circulated in the way that an escalator does, with the difference that it not only revolved but also porpoised in and out of paint. Each wire was thirteen inches long and was threaded with enough hex nuts to make ten spaces where darts could hang wet and not fatally adhere to one another. The two ends of each wire intersected a bicycle chain, from which Charest had removed rivets so the wire would fit. When Charest turned the tricycle wheels, the whole rig moved. Rising, descendingâinto the paint or dripping above itâsixteen hundred darts were in simultaneous motion. At the time, his bestsellers were “hot pink and purple” and “hot pink with eyes.” His personal favorite was “glo-yellow chartreuse and blaze.” The red-and-white dart is still the classic of the craftâas enduring as the black hockey puck. Yellow-and-red is nearly as traditional. Charest makes darts in bewildering variegations of hue, saturation, and brilliance. (“It matters to the fisherman.”)
Striper jigs were drying on the second floor among rods he was making and rods in for repair. The living-room couch was the workbench where he and his wife, Denise, would sit side by side in the evenings with racks of darts before them, tying their own blend of Flashabou and Polarflash in lieu of bucktail. In the basement, though, was the machine that had put this whole operation into a class by itself. Consisting of tricycle wheels, bicycle chains, hexagonal nuts, and threaded lengths of stiff wire, it would not have looked amiss beside an orrery. Functionally, it circulated in the way that an escalator does, with the difference that it not only revolved but also porpoised in and out of paint. Each wire was thirteen inches long and was threaded with enough hex nuts to make ten spaces where darts could hang wet and not fatally adhere to one another. The two ends of each wire intersected a bicycle chain, from which Charest had removed rivets so the wire would fit. When Charest turned the tricycle wheels, the whole rig moved. Rising, descendingâinto the paint or dripping above itâsixteen hundred darts were in simultaneous motion. At the time, his bestsellers were “hot pink and purple” and “hot pink with eyes.” His personal favorite was “glo-yellow chartreuse and blaze.” The red-and-white dart is still the classic of the craftâas enduring as the black hockey puck. Yellow-and-red is nearly as traditional. Charest makes darts in bewildering variegations of hue, saturation, and brilliance. (“It matters to the fisherman.”)
I learned from George Bernard, at the Shad Museum, in Connecticut, that William C. Miles, a Pennsylvania patent lawyer, poured metal into a turkey quill in the nineteen-thirties, making his patented Quilby Minnow, from which shad darts evolved.
Charest makes them now in Inverness, Florida, in smaller volume and with simpler apparatus, delivering them to the post office. His retreat from the bank of the Connecticut River was less a matter of retirement than a matter of moral choice. He says he became more than disgusted by “the needless slaughter of the fish,”
and was made uncomfortable by the thought that he was contributing to the slaughter. “My presence there was more harm than good. If I wasn't there, maybe they wouldn't have did that.” It gave him a sense of acute discomfort “to watch a person take what you made, catch a fish, and throw it in the bushes.” He saw too many fishermen “from out of state” ignore the six-shad Massachusetts limit, fill up coolers, and go home to sell the fish. “Somebody's got to be a guardian,” he once remarked to me. “People on the bank catch shad and kick them up into the trees. That's pathetic. It's not fair to the fish.” One day, sitting in his van, he watched two guys in a boat catching shad. With a small baseball bat, they bashed the shad, and then returned them to the river. After a while, they came ashore to buy darts. Charest told them he had seen what they were doing. One of them shrugged, and said, “I've got to get them off my hook somehow.” The guy was addressing the last person who was ever going to sell him another dart.
and was made uncomfortable by the thought that he was contributing to the slaughter. “My presence there was more harm than good. If I wasn't there, maybe they wouldn't have did that.” It gave him a sense of acute discomfort “to watch a person take what you made, catch a fish, and throw it in the bushes.” He saw too many fishermen “from out of state” ignore the six-shad Massachusetts limit, fill up coolers, and go home to sell the fish. “Somebody's got to be a guardian,” he once remarked to me. “People on the bank catch shad and kick them up into the trees. That's pathetic. It's not fair to the fish.” One day, sitting in his van, he watched two guys in a boat catching shad. With a small baseball bat, they bashed the shad, and then returned them to the river. After a while, they came ashore to buy darts. Charest told them he had seen what they were doing. One of them shrugged, and said, “I've got to get them off my hook somehow.” The guy was addressing the last person who was ever going to sell him another dart.
A dart that weighs a thirty-second of an ounce is so small that it can call to mind the dorsal hump of an ant. Thirty-second-ounce darts are in all respects like other darts, but Charest will tell you that some fishermen refer to them as “shad flies.” The list would not include this fisherman. A shad fly is a furry, bead-eyed product, not a little drop of lead. Some fly fishermenâcasting for shadâuse tapered thirty-foot fly lines that are backed with monofilament. The thirty feet of fly line shoots through the rod guides and over the water like a javelin, with the monofilament hanging on behind. It is a way of crafting an extra-long castâmore, sometimes, than a hundred feet. When the fly descends toward the water, the line coming off the reel is the same kind of line that comes off a spinning reel. Shooting tapers, as they are called, come in a variety of sink rates, in order to give you an opportunity to buy three of them instead of one. A sinking fly line is an alternative to the shooting taper. In the Delaware, you might want a line of special density in the higher water of early spring. When the river quiets down and
warms up, you will want a floating line with a sinking tip, a so-called wet tip. This requires enough reels and spools to fill a closet. Nelson Bryant, writing his fishing column in the New York Times, once pointed out candidly that fly fishermen trying for shad “cannot cast as far or as often” as spin fishermen can, and in high water have more than a little difficulty keeping the fly deep, even with full sinking lines. He went on to say, “Blind casting with a fly rod for hours is also hard work, particularly if one is standing waist-deep in cold water.” To anyone hardy enough to ignore these truths, he suggested using a weighted fly with a five-foot (or shorter) leader and a one-foot tippet of ten- or twelve-pound test. The largest shad ever caught on a fly rod came out of the Feather River, in northern California, on a tippet of two-pound testâa seven-pound four-ounce roe shad, the foster progeny of Seth Green.
warms up, you will want a floating line with a sinking tip, a so-called wet tip. This requires enough reels and spools to fill a closet. Nelson Bryant, writing his fishing column in the New York Times, once pointed out candidly that fly fishermen trying for shad “cannot cast as far or as often” as spin fishermen can, and in high water have more than a little difficulty keeping the fly deep, even with full sinking lines. He went on to say, “Blind casting with a fly rod for hours is also hard work, particularly if one is standing waist-deep in cold water.” To anyone hardy enough to ignore these truths, he suggested using a weighted fly with a five-foot (or shorter) leader and a one-foot tippet of ten- or twelve-pound test. The largest shad ever caught on a fly rod came out of the Feather River, in northern California, on a tippet of two-pound testâa seven-pound four-ounce roe shad, the foster progeny of Seth Green.
In
Fly Fishing Quarterly
, Robert Elman wrote that shad will hit “sparsely tied yellow, white, or orange streamers,” also White Millers, Royal Coachmen, Parmachene Belles, White Marabous, Dark Edsen Tigers, and Silver Yanks. The Delaware River guide Michael Padua has caught shad on a size 14 green-body caddisâa dry fly, always an uncanny achievement with a fish that has no interest in food. Padua says “you can catch shad on just about anything” from Twister-tail jigs to No. 2 and No. 3 spinners. Above Callicoon, he once saw two shad fishermen using No. 6 bare gold hooks.
Fly Fishing Quarterly
, Robert Elman wrote that shad will hit “sparsely tied yellow, white, or orange streamers,” also White Millers, Royal Coachmen, Parmachene Belles, White Marabous, Dark Edsen Tigers, and Silver Yanks. The Delaware River guide Michael Padua has caught shad on a size 14 green-body caddisâa dry fly, always an uncanny achievement with a fish that has no interest in food. Padua says “you can catch shad on just about anything” from Twister-tail jigs to No. 2 and No. 3 spinners. Above Callicoon, he once saw two shad fishermen using No. 6 bare gold hooks.
Jim Merritt, who ties dry flies and can lay one on a floating leaf far across a current, will attach to his leader, without the least loss of self-esteem, an ordinary small shad dartâeven a not-so-small shad dart weighing an eighth of an ounce. He nevertheless insists that he is fly-fishing for shad. After all, he is surrounded by people with spinning rods, slinging, as the phrase goes, hardware. He may say that he is fly-fishing for shad, but I would say that he is shad fishing with a fly rod.
Now another June has arrived, and the river is low and therefore tight in the sense that fishermen on the two sides of the main current are not as far apart as they would be in times of high water. I am in my canoe, and across from me is the great Erwin Dietz, standing on a rock, catching nothing. This happens to him so infrequently that he shows bewilderment and annoyance. While his spinning gear sweeps the channel, I slip into the river a small yellow dart by Armand Charest. In my hand is a nine-foot fly rod that Merritt made for me with Winston blanks. It is strung with a six-weight sink-tip line, five feet of braided leader, four feet of lead-core leader, and a 3X tippet. In no time, the rod is an arc, and I am dealing with a roe shad. Soon, I am dealing with a second shad. A third shad. My routine is risible, but it works. I am not casting a green-body caddis. I am casting weight, and there is nothing feathery about the motion. I flick the dart behind me (there's plenty of room) and let the line load up on the water. I cast it forward a short way into the current, then backcast it farther into the eddy behind me, where it lands and reloads for the long shot across the river. The rig is so heavy the water helps. With so much weight, you cannot conventionally forward cast and backcast, forward cast and backcast, making flattish loops in the air until you are ready to let the whole enterprise go. You'd be cracking a lead-tipped whip. Finally, I bring the rod forward and let it all fly. The dart goes out maybe sixty feet. It connects with another shad.
Erwin shouts above the sound of the river: “Was you here yesterday? Yesterday I had eleven. Today I can't catch nothing.”
I am shad fishing with a fly rod, not because of some holy reverence for the fly rod, but because sometimes in the milder currents it seems to work better than a spinning rod, somehow does a better job of finding the fish. Erwin shouts again: “I'm beating a dead horse.”
Just for the sheer science of it, I first used a chartreuse dart with a green head, then a white-and-red dart, then yellow-and-red,
then orange-and-black, then green-and-black, then gold with white bucktail, then pink-and-black, and now green-and-white with more sequins than Elvis Presleyâa dart I made six years ago and have hitherto preferred not to use. All have provoked strikes.
then orange-and-black, then green-and-black, then gold with white bucktail, then pink-and-black, and now green-and-white with more sequins than Elvis Presleyâa dart I made six years ago and have hitherto preferred not to use. All have provoked strikes.
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