Flies
Flyfishing for carp holds about as much appeal for me as getting a face tattoo. But what if my ancestors—or yours—were doing just that at the dawn of civilization? University of Connecticut anthropology professor Natalie Munro hypothesizes that this may indeed have been the case among the prehistoric people who regularly visited an ancient lake in what is today northern Israel.
Living in Eastern Idaho allows me to fish some of the finest trout water in the country, from the South Fork of the Snake to the Madison in Montana. But lately, nostalgia has drawn me south, to northern Utah’s Logan and Blacksmith Fork rivers, both of which flow through the fifty-mile-long Cache Valley where I grew up. Each of these rivers had healthy salmonfly hatches when my grandpa was a kid, but now only the Blacksmith Fork does, and few people seem to know why.
Hours into the float already, we’d chucked green and yellow, chartreuse and pink, and black and purple—some with big reflective eyes and others with barred feathers that enticingly slip and slide behind the body of the fly. Nothing was working. Brett, my musky copilot, and I weren’t moving fish like I thought we would, considering the cold mornings that fall had been delivering.
If Hexagenia limbata isn’t the GOAT of all bugs, it’s at least squarely in the conversation, beginning with its sheer size and density. “Nothing in flyfishing even comes close to the spinner fall,” says the legendary Kelly Galloup in Chris Santella’s book, The Hatch is On! “I don’t care how big a salmonfly or Mother’s Day caddis or Hendrickson hatch you’ve seen, it doesn’t compare in pure biomass.”
Now I understand how Mugato in Zoolander felt. Everyone at the fly shop is picking out different hackle, feathers, and fur, and here I am at the fly counter grabbing fistfuls of pre-tied adams and caddis, feeling left out for not tying my own.
Sitting on my fly-tying desk, on a shelf above the straggle chenille and holographic tinsel, is an 80-year-old Richard Wheatley fly tin. The edges of its aluminum lid, with that distinctive satin finish, are rubbed bright from the friction of bouncing about in a fly-vest pocket. It bears the inscription:
R.N. Jarvis
4, Short St.
Cambridge
Lockdown at the ViseFifteen flies we’ve tied during the pandemic Illustration by Paul Puckett CHERNOBYL ANTIBODY. Unlike traditional flies, you eat this one. Helps ward off belief in fictitious cicada hatches. MARJORIE TAYLOR GREENE DRAKE. Only floats on the right side of the river—the far right, more like a side channel, or a drainage…
If the big bugs don’t show, what’s option B? South Fork of the Snake Southeast Idaho Pale Morning Duns are a prolific hatch all summer on the South Fork, and often all day long. In fact, not having PMD patterns in your fly box for a day on this river is like showing up in…
Not the leave-behind you wanted My father stood in the middle of the Beaverhead River, looking upstream calmly but urgently, almost how he looks when he’s sorting cows. This was a little different. His reel and his rod’s butt section were sitting on the bank. And he had a question. “Do fly rods float?” We’d…
For noted fly tyer and guide Blane Chocklett, it is creativity that has set him apart from the folks throwing the same old patterns at the same old fish. Chocklett has made himself a life and career by searching out new fisheries and new fly patterns. If you have flyfished for a while, especially for…
The best thing about a nightmare is the split-second you wake up and realize it was only a dream. Author Kirk W. Johnson skipped that moment, when, on December 29, 2005, he sleepwalked out of his second-floor hotel window in what he describes in the prologue of his new book, The Feather Thief, as a…
Clyde arrived in the southernmost tip of the continental United States this November. His first few months in the Keys were spent on a lift in a local shop where a generous mechanic glued, zip-tied, and hammered parts back on him. Eventually, I ran into his caretakers at a party. Keys were exchanged and I…
“Hey, Lucky,” Scott asks, “I can’t get this Chuggernaut to chug. What am I doing wrong?” My friend Scott Noble has traveled from Spokane, Washington, to Hayward, Wisconsin, with the singular goal of catching a musky on a fly. And now, finally here in the bow of the boat, being guided by Brian “Lucky” Porter…
Smallmouth: Modern Fly-fishing Methods, Tactics & Techniques Tim Landwehr & Dave Karczynski $29.95 Stackpole Books Most of the how-to flyfishing books at your local library come from accomplished anglers that aren’t very good at writing. This book isn’t one of them. Lifelong smallmouth guide Tim Landwehr of Tight Lines Fly Fishing Company in DePere, Wisconsin,…
Her hand, inches from my nose, is filled with a half dozen hooks in varying states of undress and oxidation. Reaching out, I choose a moderately rusty hook with a small clump of fur dangling from a bit of unraveling thread. “Just think of it like summer camp craft hour,” she says, holding up a…
I’m sitting in Bob Mitchell’s Fly Shop in St. Paul, Minnesota, watching Brian Bergeson tie a fly. His thread wraps are quick and confident. He trims a tightly bound clump of bucktail and a plume of hair rises and settles to the table. His Red Bull sits safely outside the fallout radius. His fingers seem…
IT’S 3:00 A.M. IN THE EVERGLADES AND TIM BORSKI IS LOOKING FOR SNAKES. I’m riding along with him as we drive very slowly down State Road 9336—the only four-digit road in Florida. It is 34 miles from Florida City to Flamingo, a distance we are currently covering at about 15 miles per hour. “Right up…
Last year, master craftsman Gene Dumper took several of his hand-tied flies, encased them in Clear Cure Goo, and created this special toilet seat in his Portland, Maine, workshop. After months of in-house testing, Dumper sent his prototype to America’s leading multichannel merchant, L.L.Pinto, resulting in a contract for a dozen custom seats.
I WAS A LITTLE SURPRISED when Enrico Puglisi told me that his favorite permit fly was not his EP Crab. Nor was it his lifelike Descendent Crab, or his Palometa Crab, or even the fly he named after the fish itself, the Permit Crab. It’s a shrimp pattern. More precisely, his Spawning Shrimp, #4, in…