Troutsmith (8 page)

We stayed a week in Stockbridge and soon settled into the pace of English village life. Rising early each morning, I took a walk down the village high street to greet the river and the fat brown and rainbow trout that rose to flies or grubbed along the bottom for scuds and sow bugs just a few feet from the edge of the pavement.

Duncan Weston, a tall, white-haired giant of a Scot, was assigned to be our guide for the week. We got along famously right from the beginning. As Teresa and I tackled up on our first morning beside the clear-as-air Bullington Stream on the upper Test, Duncan explained the rules of the water to us. “We've been assigned beat number two,” he said. In the UK and Europe, a “beat” is a marked stretch of river that has been reserved for the exclusive use of one or more anglers for a set period of time. The beat system spreads people out and keeps them from getting in each other's way. Duncan continued, “Dry fly and nymph only, and the flies must be cast to visible trout.” This wasn't much of a restriction on the crystalline Bullington Stream, where trout and grayling could easily be seen from twenty yards away. “Beat number two is small for a full day's fishing, but I checked the log book today and nobody has signed up for beat number one or beat number three, so we might be able to fish those beats after lunch.” With some misgivings we showed Duncan our fly boxes, which were filled with typical Wisconsin patterns like the Bead-head Pink Squirrel, Bead-head Woolly Bugger, Bead-head Prince, Bead-head Biot Bug, and Bead-head Pheasant Tail Nymph. Sure enough, Duncan frowned as he scanned the rows of perfectly tied flies. “What do you think?” I asked. “Well, Kev,” he replied, “I've seined the chalkstreams and studied their fly life for more than thirty years, and I have yet to see a nymph wearing a brass deep-sea diver's helmet.”

I will always remember that first morning's walk along the beautiful channels of the Bullington Stream, floored with golden gravel and bordered with thick emerald masses of cress and water crowfoot. With every trout and every feeding grayling we passed, my heart beat faster. Finally we reached the bottom of beat number two. Trout were rising quietly beneath the low branches of some hawthorn trees on my own bank. Duncan had a look, and I had a look. Then we conferred. “I think they're taking nymphs a few inches beneath the surface,” I said. “It's their backs and tails that are coming out of the water when they rise.” Duncan smiled, “Ah, right enough. Have ya' got any Pheasant Tail or Greenwell Nymphs not rigged for minesweeping?” I did. Once I had a fly on the leader, I got down on my hands and knees and crept and crawled to the edge of the stream about thirty feet below the feeding trout. Duncan smiled again. I had the butt section of the leader treated to float and the tippet treated to sink. Then I took a deep breath and sent the day's first cast looping over the Bullington Stream.

The little Pheasant Tail Nymph settled onto the surface of the water about thirty-five feet away and sank immediately. I watched the floating part of the leader like a hawk. It stopped and pulled upstream, and I set the hook into a fat, high-flying Test trout. “Boy, you are a show-off, aren't ya'?” Duncan laughed. He handed me his net as I brought the trout in. The net was the usual kind seen on the chalkstreams, where the banks are swampy and the trout have to be netted some distance away from where the angler is standing. A hollow, black anodized steel handle, brass collar, and an aluminum frame were folded up tightly. Duncan took the net in hand and gave it a flip of his wrist. Instantly the aluminum frame rotated forward and snapped securely onto the end of the handle. Then Duncan put his foot into the frame and extended the net handle to its full length of four-and-a-half feet. The extended reach of this long net made landing the trout easy.

Teresa took a photo as I released the fire-gilt two-pound brownie back into the icy flow of the Bullington Stream. Then I cleaned Duncan's net by swashing it back and forth in the water and shaking it dry before folding it up and returning it to him. Duncan looked at me in amazement. “In all the years I've been guiding anglers on the chalkstreams, you are the first to clean my net before giving it back to me,” he said.

The end of that week-long, week-short friendship was a sad occasion for both of us. We had shared so many moments of victory and defeat on the broad water of the Test and on the smaller, more intimate River Meon southeast of Winchester. On one of our last mornings together Duncan greeted me in the parking lot of the White Hart in Stockbridge. “I have a present for you,” he said simply, and then he gave his net to me.

Would you like to be young again? All of us ponder this question at some point in our adult lives. The best response is probably “Yes, if I could have what I have now and know what I know now.” But it seems to me that, of all people, we as twenty-first-century anglers are in the best position to travel back in time and relive some of the events of our fishing youth. How different things would have been if only we could have fished then with the skill and wisdom we have today. Then again, maybe not much would change, given the limits of the tackle and gear we used in those early days and our limited opportunities to fish. At any rate, there came a day when I thought it would be fun to try and turn back the clock, both to answer these questions and to compare freshwater fly fishing as it was for me in the mid-1970s with how things are in my fly-fishing today.

The rod rack on my basement landing bristles with the latest graphite rods fitted with racy-looking fly, spinning, and casting reels. But in that gleaming array of twenty-first-century tackle there is one outfit that looks as forlorn and out-of-place as Charlie Brown's Christmas tree. It's a green Garcia Conolon “3-star” fiberglass fly rod that was originally eight feet long (now a tad shy of seven feet nine inches), with a Heddon 310 single-action fly reel attached, and it was a Christmas present in 1974. This was the rod and reel that I used to catch my first trout on a fly, and I kept them as a remembrance.

Not much tackle has survived from that period. As a teenager I fished hard on a tight budget, and most items of tackle I had in the 1970s were lost, broken, or worn out and discarded long ago. Only the rod, reel, and an old Perrine aluminum fly box survive, along with my fishing journal for 1975–82 and my first fly vest (vintage 1976 or '77). Every now and then, especially when I'm taking a break from tying flies on a dark winter night, I walk over and pick up my old rod, flex it, spin the reel a few times, and reverently set it back in its place of honor on the rod rack.

My old green fly rod set a record for end-to-end damage that stands to this day. Somehow I kept fishing with it because I never scraped together enough money to replace it. I don't remember when I broke the tip off, but the repair job was simple. I just biked over to the local sporting goods store, bought a replacement spinning rod tip, and glued it onto the end after cutting away the last snake guide and its thread wraps. The next snake guide had only half of the original thread wraps; the lower foot was tied on crudely with peach-colored sewing thread. This must have started to unravel, because at some later time I reinforced it with black electrical tape. Another snake guide was completely rewrapped, this time with blue sewing thread (and not a bad job really). I liked the nickel-silver ferrules, perhaps the only detail this rod shared with fine cane rods of the day. All of the original decals were worn away except for part of the Garcia crest below the stripping guide and three gold stars above the grip. The keeper ring had completely disappeared. A moment of youthful exuberance damaged the end of the down-locking reel seat: I had tried to hurdle a guardrail at the top of a steep bank while hiking back to the car after fishing Pennsylvania's Beltzville Reservoir. This episode destroyed the butt cap, but I jury-rigged a replacement with some kind of plastic weather stripping cut to size and crudely hammered into place where the butt cap used to be. Amazingly, this battered old fly rod still casts a mean line today and I can catch fish with it. But there was a time when my old rod was factory fresh and gleaming.

In my journal there's a picture of me holding the first good fish I caught with the rod: a twenty-one-inch walleye from below Rough River Dam near Leitchfield, Kentucky. The fish struck a #8 Woolly Worm fished deep at the end of a 3x leader and is still the only walleye I've ever caught on a fly. The picture was taken in March 1975, and I'd had the fly rod and reel for less than three months. They looked stunning. All the guides were intact. The light green fiberglass blank contrasted nicely with the dark green wraps, the decals were fresh, the cork of the grip was pale and new, and the green-anodized reel seat glittered in the sunlight. Where could I find my old rod in new or near-new condition?

The answer, like the answers to so many questions, was on my desktop. Simple searches on eBay turned up lightly used examples of my green Garcia fly rod every couple of weeks. The same was true of the Heddon 310 reel. This tackle was inexpensive when it was new, and I probably paid as much for the rod and reel on eBay in 2008 as my dad did at SportMart in 1974, except that a dollar went a lot further in 1974.

It felt like Christmas when the long cardboard tube arrived in the mail. I carefully unpacked my “new” old green fly rod, mounted the reel on it, and laid it out next to the “old” old green fly rod. The differences were so stark that a casual observer might not have believed that they were the same make and model. All the guides and fittings on the new old rod were intact, including the little wire keeper ring above the winding check. Decals, only slightly deteriorated, identified the rod as a model “#8237-A, 8′, DRY FLY ACTION, AFTMA #6 & 7,” details I once knew by heart but had forgotten over the years.

In the mid-1970s such fly rods were considered versatile, all-around fly rods for most freshwater fishing. The 5-weight fly rods were light trout rods; 3- and 4-weight rods were just starting to become popular. The majority of trout specialists that I knew used 7½-foot fiberglass or split cane fly rods that carried 5-weight lines for most of their fishing. Longer rods, whether glass or bamboo, weren't very popular then because they were relatively heavy. The introduction of light-weight graphite (carbon fiber) rods completely altered the fishing landscape, and now long rods are back in vogue. The first production graphite fly rods came onto the market in 1973; the Fenwick HMG series. I bought one in 1990 and loved it, but in 1975 such a rod was out of my very limited economic reach.

Cortland 333 fly lines are still on the market today, so it was a simple matter to buy a reasonable facsimile of my 1975 fly line. Like all successful tackle makers, Cortland has continually improved this entry-level fly line. But one thing has stayed the same over the years: the 333 was, and is, a fantastic value. It casts better and lasts longer than many so-called premium fly lines.

“DRY FLY ACTION” gave me a good laugh when I took my new old fly rod out to the side yard for a bit of casting practice. What was a good, stiff, fast-action rod in 1975 was a snail-slow, floppy action compared to today's graphite rods. At first I didn't think I would be able to fish with such a noodle, but once I slowed down my casting stroke it wasn't so bad. Indeed, I could see a definite advantage to the super-soft rod if the conditions forced me to fish with 7x or 8x tippets, and I recalled that I did have a spool of 8x Maxima in my fishing bag during that first year of fly fishing. I thought of the 8x (0.5-pound test) monofilament as my secret weapon for highly educated Pennsylvania trout.

I was surprised by the memories, visions really, that welled up in my mind while I was casting. I recalled a hot July evening on the big Delaware in Pennsylvania, in the fast water above Sandt's Eddy, where a #6 Muddler Minnow slung as far across the river as I could cast caught five fat smallmouth bass from 1½ to 3 pounds. I could feel the rod bend right down to the handle as a red-eyed smallmouth bored deep in a bid to cut the tippet or snag the fly on the rocks. One rainy October morning on northern Michigan's Platte River, I saw a continuous procession of trophy chinook salmon, coho salmon, brown trout, and steelhead pass by in plain sight while I cast yarn flies and literally shook with excitement. I killed five fish that day, and as I trudged back to our campsite in the cedars, my stringer was so heavy with giant trout and salmon that I could hardly keep their tails from dragging on the ground. There was my first trip to northern Manitoba for walleye and northern pike, where one day I tried to catch a pike on a fly in Grass River Provincial Park, and almost did it too. And there was that magical June day when I finally solved the puzzle of fly fishing southwest Wisconsin's spring creeks. Fishing a Quill Gordon wet fly across and downstream on Mill Creek, I creeled a limit of fat, wild brown trout, trout whose flesh cut as red as a sockeye salmon's when I cleaned them by the stream before hiking over the hills back to the car. All of these experiences happened in my first three seasons of hard-core fly fishing, 1975–77, with that green Garcia fly rod.

Thirty-five years have passed since those days, but I still have a lot of fun turning back the clock every so often. I've discovered that time travel is a question of degree. First-degree time travel happens when at some point during a fishing day I cut off the Klinkhammer, Chernobyl Ant, Gummy Minnow, or whatever currently fashionable fly pattern happens to be knotted to the end of my leader and replace it with a #12 March Brown wet fly or McGinty on the point and a #14 Leadwing Coachman or Cowdung on a dropper. I might turn back the clock even further and fish three wet flies at once, across and downstream in the classic style. Do the old methods still work in the highly charged, super-competitive, five-second-attention-span fly-fishing world of today? Do some research (preferably from old magazines), construct your own time machine, and find out. I don't want to ruin your voyage of discovery.

Second-degree time travel happens when I leave my modern fishing gear at home and take my youth outfit to a lake, pond, or stream that I fished as a boy. My youth outfit is a modest collection of old tackle that is as close as possible to the gear I used from 1975– 77: eight-foot green fiberglass Garcia fly rod, Heddon 310 fly reel loaded with a few yards of braided Dacron backing and a DT6F line, and a canvas Arcticreel that doubles as a fishing bag to hold a Perrine aluminum fly box, three or four dozen flies limited to patterns and sizes I used then, some tapered nylon leaders, a couple of tippet spools, and a nail clipper for trimming knots. That was all I carried with me on a fishing excursion. What a stark contrast to the bulging-to-the-limit fly vest I wear on the stream today. Life was definitely simpler then, but I would have made it more complicated if I could have.