The thought itself is fairly unnerving, you’re all part of a vast fly fishing conspiracy, whom I’d like to think will be undone by my plaintive squeal, but more likely my driveway will fill with black sedans, and I’ll be having high tea with patriots like Ollie North …
… right before my blog disappears and you’re staring at an oft-longed for “404 error.”
It all starts simply enough. I’m researching the East and West Forks of the Carson River, which I’ve never been to and will be fishing in a week or so – and my fishing buddy orders the “killer dozen” from the local fly shop and plunks them on my desk for review.
I’m looking at seven nymphs and five dry flies, and all seven have bright golden beads and half the materials are opalescent tinsel or iridescent flash of some kind, and I’m wondering why no one besides me even notices the sudden and complete dominance of attractor flies, and how they snuck in without even the dry fly crowd noticing.
Trends being dominant in our fairly technical sport, with vendors and experts alike, insisting whatever we used last year cannot compare to the airy lightness of this year’s model …
When Ernie Schweibert’s “Matching the Hatch” ended the reign of the attractor in the 1950’s – there was song, dance, and thousands of articles on false gods, new prophets, and every angler added Latin to his light cocktail banter.
Two fellows met on the trail and the familiar greeting had morphed into pidgin sophistication, “… caught all mine on a Ephemerella Canadensis, with a pronounced anastomosed wing, a hint of mottle, and some snowshoe hare I used to imitate the E. Pluribus Unum.”
Us “real” anglers feigned the regurge when we were out of eyesight, insisting that “His Lordship” was a “nose-inna-air” fanbois-purist, and only us backwoods types understood the true piscatorial mind, in spite of our matching ascots, flashy gear, and similar sounding lisp.
As this was pre-Bobbercator, the magazines and periodicals had room to applaud our scientific bent, knowing it was only a matter of time before one of us got the Nobel prize snapping pictures of Plecoptera fornication – or wrote the Trico-Sutra. In the meantime, Latin infused every issue and Science was the reason for an enlarged wingcase, a soft hackle, a rod taper, or a furry undercarriage.
Vendors appealed to our sudden bent towards egg headed-ness, and stopped phrasing their sales pitch in terms of luck or fancy, rather our understanding of physics had entered rarified post graduate space – and instinctively we knew that direction of the graphite weave could alter both space and time, and unless it had been to the Moon – or was a progeny of the aerospace industry it wasn’t fit garb nor tackle …
… relegating bait and lures to the Unclean Thing, whose use was an admission of Piltdown Man, low IQ and a single, unbroken eyebrow.
With fifty years of us genius’s running around the environment, insisting simply everyone must listen to every opinion, we’ve taken a fancy to all that faux-intelligence we’ve convinced ourselves we possess – which is why you appear a tad reluctant to admit …
… that attractors are functional flies with the killing power equal to a Swisher & Richards NoHack, that Latin is unnecessary when it comes to fishing – and worst yet, we haven’t been honing skills at all, instead the more consistent fish catchers are twice as LUCKY as the rest of us …
… which is why I mention the end of the single biggest trend in the last half century, and all I get a yawn …
Denial.
Let me put it to you a little differently, just so you can embrace what the next fifty years will be about …
If you perched on a log, and wired a small treble hook to your big toe and tied an overhand knot of Christmas tinsel, held your nose and keened, “eebie, eebie, Eebie” – you’ve got a better than even chance of limiting.
… If they are hatchery fish with monkeyed-genetics, you could start a goddamn cannery with that ensemble …
Knowing what I know now – the ascension of Attractors, and the validation of Bergman, Brooks, and more importantly, your Dad – which is the most painful of all given the attempts to “Xtreme” the sport and remove all vestiges of Poppa and his pipe … it doesn’t surprise me you’re attempting to cold-shoulder this fundamental shift in our beloved sport.
That’s denial squared, babe.
Every so often I wish they would reinsert me back into the Matrix with the rest of you. I long for those innocent days when the tinkle of small talk included, fast action, limp, or Spey, and we’d not so much as blink at the thousand dollar price tag, when we could move onto weightier topics, whether carbon fiber wrapped to the right is more effective than the same cloth wrapped to the left …
… but in light of this old direction of shiny and colorful flies, I can’t shake the thought that if a river moves five miles an hour and a fish can see a size twenty insect for only 12 inches – with a quarter second to decide whether to strike or no, they must eat a ton of mouse turds and cigarette butts, given the fields nearby are full of them, and when dry – float nicely …
Naturally, I’ve got a big hammy foot squarely in both worlds. Half of my nymphs start with a big gold bead and some opalescent something-or-other, and the rest are decidedly old school, given that it’s honestly quite hard to improve the efficacy of the original Pheasant Tail nymph, Zug Bug, Hare’s Ear, or AP Black, despite all of our collective attempts to make it so much more … visible.
The only difference I can detect between “new” and “old” is beads being so much heavier – whose weight is concentrated in such a small space – makes more of a splash when landing than the unweighted or weighted non-beaded fly.
Meaning, I’ll have to cast one a bit further from the quarry than the other, that’s all.
But if fish are stupid, and care not whether they eat a dislodged Caddis versus a submerged dog turd, isn’t the real issue – and root cause of your unrest – the invalidation of all that vendor bullshit, and the public disclosure that you’re a damn fool for buying expensive tackle?
In that case, a guy that pays $800 for a set of waders is a real jackass – because if a fish is dumb enough to eat anything drug through the water – than only a nincompoop blows all his cash on something expensive – unless it’s a fashion statement and being seen is everything.
Ditto for the thousand dollar rod, as you’re an idiot regardless of income level, and proof there’s a sucker born every minute …
Which is why you’re clinging desperately to the ghost of Ernest Schwiebert’s scientific angling, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary in your fly box, hoping no one will notice the both of us have closets jammed with expensive gear.
Our enlarged craniums rationalized how we could purchase exceptional gear and read enough books and we’d remove “Luck” from the fishing equation …
We were excited that we’d be able to tell the rest of the world, “any Luck?” was a heinous slur, and how it was raw … goddamn … smarts that made us successful, not luck …
… luck was for guys that smeared marshmallow-salmon egg on their pant’s leg, who sat and watched the gals sunbathing while getting drunk, steadfastly ignoring both rod tip and its commotion.
So you cling to your anatomically correct dry flies for fear someone will notice the same thing I did, and won’t tell a friend of a friend – who knows your wife, so the next time you beg for an aircraft-grade anything, she’ll scoff at the notion of it bleeding energy when the anti-matter based disc turns gaseous, and how real masculinity requires you to have not one – but a pair of them.
It’s ok, your Dad had plenty of science backing his assertion that an Alexandra, with its fetching iridescent Peacock and sliver of red quill wing, was so killing a fly because red was the color of blood and therefore all that silver tinsel body was wounded … and … so very vulnerable …
One of the great frustrations of fly fishing has been our collective hope that the rest of the planet would view our small hobby as something larger, perhaps embracing it as a way of life, or reason for a conservationist Jihad …
We call it “Teardown Wednesdays” – where midweek shows and no massive oil spill has occurred on your favorite waterway, no invasive species is blissfully munching its way through your garage roof, and your daughter appears interested in an egghead for once, versus “SPaZ” the class psycho-killer …
I’ve been lazy given the repair is easy enough. I just need to find something with a fine point to spritz a little epoxy under the rear hood to make the problem go away.
It’s one of the things I learned as a guide, what you think may be on the water never lives up to reality, so I hike down from the parking area to scan the water versus force feeding fish with my best guess.
While working through the willows, something had hooked one of the guides and pulled the tip right off the rod, and now I’m on hands and knees looking for a two foot length of brown, amidst a lot of brown things.
Then I heard them self-same pals at work mention, “Him? Yea, I’m, going with Fatty, mostly because the SOB cooks better than my wife – and is the only source of Grizzly hackle between here’n Nevada.”
