August 13, 1975. The Grateful Dead were on hiatus. They had played one set at Kezar Stadium earlier that year and a show at Winterland. The Winterland show introduced a trio of new tunes, two of which were instrumentals. I’m not sure people in general had a name for these songs back then. On August 13, 1975 they opened the show with those three songs. The first one now had words to it.

“Paradise waits 
On the crest of a wave her angels in flame”

About three and a half minutes into the song Jerry takes up the lead. It may not be his longest, but it is the quintessential Jerry Garcia lead. Jerry’s contemporary rock guitarists came from the tradition of blues guitar. They played their leads in sentences or phrases making up little verses.

Here’s one of the masters of that movement Clapton on Crossroads. You can see that structure.

But Jerry’s lead rolled. Just when you expected a phrase to end it got extended, and extended again. It was a masterful steering of the music down twisting and turning roads to places you didn’t think were there, not on that particular little drive. Sometimes it wasn’t that long, other times it was. Here’s Not Fade Away from 5/8/77. Granted it was all a little different that day, but listen to this, the musical phrase becomes a sentence, which becomes a paragraph and still it keeps on rolling, and it becomes a chapter and still keeps rolling. Just when you think you’ve reached the end of the road you take a turn and there’s more ahead.

And it wasn’t just the various and sundry long songs and Dark Stars. Sometimes this rolling lead was dished out in small chunks, but it was the nature of the lead, the construct that I am always amazed by. The long sentences that really convey something.

And then there’s the monstrous Here Comes Sunshine from Cleveland on 12/6/73. The Garcia lead just won’t quit.

The thing about these leads is Jerry’s ability to keep going on and on with very little in any repetition. These aren’t verses and choruses, they aren’t variations on the same theme - he doesn’t return to a base line and then explore outwards in different directions - he just goes on and on. Like a long winding road, forever presenting a new vista at each bend.

I haven’t seen many guitarists do that. One who does do it from time to time is Trey and it was a pleasure to see him do it on Golden Road in Chicago about 10 years ago.

I often wonder what sort of influence Jerry’s playing had on Trey, but there is something in there. That same wandering lead, that goes on just a little bit after you’d think the phrase had ended.

Jerry also had was the incredible ability to lay out an intertwining lead playing off Bobby’s work through the entire length of the song. Here’s 3 minutes of absolute joy in a Me and My Uncle. And he did this anew for the over 600 renditions of this song!

Earlier versions of Black Throated Wind always reminded me of a set of lyrics looking for a tune. A sort of repetitive restricted chord backing to a poem or something. The, at some stage, it seems Jerry decided this song needed melody and harmony. The result is what we think of now. This thing with Garcia winding his way in and out of the gates like a skier on a run down a tight slalom course, hitting the sharp turns exquisitely and hitting the occasional mogul with aplomb.

Here’s Jerry taking us out of Chinacat into a blistering Rider, culminating in a vociferous display of the master at work. That bit at the end of Rider - just go listen to it, I don’t have the vocabulary to describe it for you.

At the foot of this lofty mountain lies a river very dear to my heart. When I am tired or feeling down I often lie back, and in my mind I “listen to the river sing sweet songs to rock my soul.”

As the winter snows melt away, and the valley below becomes lush and green it comes alive with a world of teeming insects. About halfway down the floatable part of this river there is a boat ramp, and once the crowds are gone the beauty of the river and its banks comes into its own.

The left bank is a mass of trees that hang over the water, and there is a trough connecting numerous potholes running down that bank for almost two miles as you travel downstream.

Even as summer fades into fall and the aspens turn gold, the tamarack and willows fade, and the waters drop the river still hugs that shore.

The trees and bushes that line that bank are the homes of divers varieties of ants and beetles and other little creepy crawlies, who, through various misfortunes find themselves in the river, to be seen and eaten by the trout that live along that bank.

Every morning in the summer a flotilla of boats leaves the ramp. They all bump down the middle of the river, Thingamabobbers bobbing, nymphs nymphing, tourists touristing and guides doing whatever it is guides are doing. Get to the ramp after noon and there isn’t a soul around.

"Now is the time of returning
With our thought jewels polished and gleaming"

If you’re up to it rig up your rods with a beetle and an ant (yes we out here fish two dry flies on our leader), polish up your side arm casting and start plopping those flies under the trees. The trout slurp them down with relish, sometimes two at a time.

That is the beauty of fishing terrestrials. They do get deposited in trout waters, sometimes in copious numbers, but often regularly enough to be recognized as food and in a manner that attracts the trouts’ attention. Their presence on the water is mostly happenstance. And so you don’t need a hatch or perfect timing to have fun fishing them. And they’re available to trout in streams big and small. This little woodland limestoner near my other home is another great terrestrial stream, and it is full of delightful little trout, like this little ant eating brown, appropriate to the size of the stream.

Fishing terrestrials is often an overlooked part of our sport. But when the hatches are gone, terrestrials provide fine action for the trout fisherman. Of course there are the fabled hopper waters, especially out west, but the lowly ant and beetle can be just as much fun.

I’m an engineer. We consider empirical knowledge to be as valid as things that can be explained through a provable theorem or deduced by logic. I have no idea why it is so, but observation tells me that multiple casts to a location are really not a winning proposition when fishing with terrestrials. It seems to be a game with rather rapidly diminishing returns. I would fish a river such as this with terrestrials, if I was doing it from a boat.

In fact I have, even on the day this picture was taken. We always have a blast there when the Japanese Beetles are out every summer. I would also fish a stream such as this with terrestrials

Both because I can keep moving, easily, hitting new water with ever second cast. But I would never dream of fishing this river with terrestrials even though the banks look attractive.

It’s too small for a boat and the current and depth make it a tedious wading job, at least for an old fogey such as I.

I don’t know why that is so. There may be something to this whole thing about trout being able to gauge how much energy they spend versus what they can get in return from their food, but I don’t really think so. I think that’s another one of those anthropomorphic attributes granted to trout that really doesn’t pass the smell test. I’ve come across some folks, way smarter than most humans who couldn’t do that in the amount of time it takes for an ant to flow past a trout’s picture window. I think if the trout is at a spot where it can rise, it will rise to anything that draws its attention. If that is the case it will probably rise the first time. Yes, field of view and such may matter, but that applies equally for each successive cast if you can’t see the fish. If you chose the best possible lie and cast well, each successive cast in that general vicinity is either trying to show a fish the same thing in the hope that it will change its mind, or you’re betting on some subtle difference showing the fly to a different fish. If you can read the water the first cast should be to the most likely spot. One of two more for contingencies and then move on.

One of the old timers, I forget who, Art Flick or someone allegedly ate an ant to see why trout like it and decided it was because of the acidic taste. I guess ants are full or formic acid or something. Good for him. I don’t believe the pea brains trout have allow them to register liking tastes and remembering that a year later when they happen to see an ant floating by. I suspect it’s just that ants have a form that allows them to be easily picked out by the trout’s hazy vision and once they do it passes the food test. Ants are light enough to be held up by the surface tension and their gangly legs and bodies form nice sparkly divots on the surface, all good trout attracting qualities.

They also tend to wiggle about on the surface. Movement is always an attention grabber in hazy conditions such as a trout’s vision. The traditional fur ant works well, but even in my youth it required too much attention to keep floating right. 40 some years ago I came across a pattern called the McMurray ant and fished it for a long time. I still have some bodies left over and tie the occasional one up. The McMurray ant used two little cylinders of balsa strung onto a bit of monofilament and dipped in lacquer. Makes a pretty fly.

The thing about cylindrical bodies, especially when at an angle to the plane, is that their intersection with a flat plane is actually an oval. A fly with two cylinders as a body resting on the water surface looks like two slender ovals from below. Add a thin waist and some hackle and you get everything needed to get past the lousy eyesight trout have. Of late, as I get older I’ve taken to just tying foam bodied ants. Unless you think you’re living in and Edgar Rice Burroughs novel we’re not talking about those things that look like the flip flops from my youth tied to a hook. I’m talking about a much more gentile creature.

I normally buy the foam with white tips and use permanent markers to color them into shades I can see in different conditions. The trout don’t seem to mind. Like this fellow from this verdant mountain stream with a red dotted foam ant in his lip.

They do double duty as flying ants by the simple addition of a sparkle yarn wing.

My companion to an ant is a beetle. I rarely fish one without the other. The beetle is a slightly more robust and rotund chap, mostly hitting the water with a plop. A bulky body helps. I use either deer hair or foam folded over the underbody . I find the deer hair gives a most satisfactory ploy when dropped on the water with a firm hand. And I like an underbody created by twirling together and wrapping multiple strands of peacock herl. The compact and dense structure comes down with a resounding plop. If you fish both an ant and a beetle you’ll find the beetle normally gets taken within the first 12-18 inches of where the fly lands. The ant, could be a while down the drift.

I consider the plop of a beetle to be absolutely essential. I’ve seen fish come running from far away drawn by that plop. My friend Matt Murphy is so enamored of the plop that he ties a bigger foam beetle with a black brass bead tied to the middle of the hook. That makes the kind of plop that draws even something like this up from an undercut under a big tree root ball.

It was somewhere in the later half of the 1960s. I was an impressionable young lad who would sit in my father’s study and look through his copies of Outdoor Life, Field and Stream and other such magazines. I learned all about going on safari from Jack O’Connor and longed to be old enough to have a .270 Winchester. I was immensely upset the year Dad opted for a .243 - how could he, Jack swore by the .270 and had a whole plethora of African game to show for it. And amongst my fishing idols was one Vince Marinaro. A guy who once hooked a trout so large on the Letort that he, forevermore carried a salmon net with him on that stream. Amongst everything else he once wrote about a fly called the Pontoon Hopper. I tried valiantly to tie some, and the efforts were miserable. It was a complicated contraption with cutoff treble hooks, turkey quills and bits of cork, moose hair and whatnot.

Many years later, as a grad student I did start fishing the Letort, and still do. But I resorted to using Ed Shenk’s Letort Hopper and Cricket patterns. They’re durable flies that are relatively easy to tie and very easy to give that twitch to, that is so essential for effective hopper fishing. The spun hair body and long hair wing do a wonderful job of creating a plop when the fly hits the water, and the flared ends give the impression of legs and scooting the fly along the surface.

The traditional Ed Shenk pattern is tied with a dubbed body. But the Letort Hopper and Cricket tend to sink after a few fish have chewed on it. Before I looked at deer hair in detail I thought that was because the body got soaked after a fish or two. And that’s true. So I started tying them with foam cylinder bodies. But I found that the toothy browns I was bring up with these flies tore those bodies up. The dubbed bodies would sink, the foam ones would get chewed up. You could dry the dubbed ones out. The foam ones were shot after a few fish. So it’s back to the dubbed bodies. I tie them in all sorts of sizes and colors though a big yellow one seems best, even when all around are hoppers with green bodies.

A good friend of mine swears by the Henry’s Fork Hopper, especially in slow water. I tied a few up. They look great. They are a royal pain to tie and they catch no more fish than the Letort Hopper.

Hoppers generally drop into the water with a generous splash and immediately start swimming for shore. They tend to intersperse their scooting around with periods of drifting. The best hopper water is characterized by plenty of stream side vegetation and a deep slot along the bank. A wind when the hoppers are active helps a lot. This is the upper Colorado river.

And this is Mossy Creek in central western Virginia

In the summer the winds come blowing down both valleys, the hoppers get feisty and a lot of them end up in the water. The trout take them with gusto. There is a bit of a trick to getting the best out of hopper fishing. Plop the hopper down with a splash, let it drift for a tad then shake your rod tip just ever so little to make the hopper or cricket twitch, then let it drift some more and twitch again.

Crickets tend to be a lot more prevalent later in the year, in fact way into the fall. My buddy Kevin Wildgen and I often fish the Colorado downstream of Glenwood Spring in the late fall between Halloween and Thanksgiving. As the sun starts dipping down towards the Western horizon the chirping of crickets becomes the music of the approaching night.

And there you have the major food groups in the terrestrial arena. Every 14 years or so the “cicadas sing a rare and different tune”. And inchworms fall from trees and all sorts of other things find their way into the streams. But the ants, beetles, hoppers and crickets do the yeoman work of terrestrial fishing.

Just remember plop the beetles, slam the hoppers and crickets and twitch them. They’ll do wonders.

As the fall sets in and the first frosts hit the higher ranges the elk start moving down into my valley. Some say those first frosts actually kick up the hopper activity as the afternoon sun still brings respite.

But way down in the lower reaches it’s now the time of the cricket. Even with a smattering of snow they’ll still crawl out and chirp their hearts out in the evenings. The river banks will now see elk and bear come down from up high, and as the days grow shorter we’ll find the trout eager to grab an errant cricket along the shore.

Soon the winter will come with its freezing weather and the time of the terrestrial will fade. But:

Winter gray and falling rain, summers fade and roses die
You'll see summer come again, like a song that's born to soar the sky 

If you look at various social media sites you’ll see a lot of people posting Grateful dead songs every morning. A sort of Deadhead good morning rite of absolute beauty. I am one of those people. When you look at these you’ll find a preponderance of the heavy jam oriented multiple song medleys. There will be a ton of posts with a Help>Slip>Franklin’s or a Dark Star>St Stephen>The Eleven or some variation of Dark Star>something>SomethingElse or a China Rider, Scarlet Fire type of thing. And I know The Grateful Dead are known as the quintessential Jam Band (even though, thankfully, that Godforsaken term wasn’t popularized until the very late 1990s).

What the Grateful Dead did was improvise. And yes, sometimes those improvisations were carried on massive, towering platforms like a Dark Star or a PITB. But the beauty of the band was that even the little songs were amazingly intricate explorations of space by the members of the band. Here’s a simple little cowboy song, originally written by John Phillips of The Mamas and the Papas as delivered by John Denver

This was the song most played live by the Grateful Dead who played it over 600 times in their career for an average of about once every 4 shows. They didn’t make a big production out of it, it was just something they threw out there. It was always shy of 4 minutes. But look at what they packed into those 3 odd minutes, such as this one from 1971 (which by the way was casually tucked in betw een two halves of The Other One)

and 18 years later, “and we high tailed it down to Mexico” and nine beats later Bobby’s sitting there waiting for them as they all come together.

Reminds me of a braided trout river, like the Yellowstone.

And the little improvised accents could show up at anytime, in any old song, from any one of the members. Here’s an itty bitty little Bertha, trudging along comfortable enough until Mickey finds the cowbells amongst his drums and all of sudden it’s a whole different sort of thing.

I remember as a young lad our Cub Scout leader sitting by a camp fire delivering a meek rendition of the exploits of the guy in love with Felina, quite in keeping with Marty Robbins cowboy song. Then the Grateful Dead got hold of it, and according to Jerry played it to pacify Weir. But that didn’t stop him from winding his way through it, laying out a layer of guitar work that matched the moment, wandering, winding, wending its way through the song as he best saw fit that day.

I never tire of telling the story of my first Peggy-O. I’ve written about this one before, but I’ll just place it out here as a masterpiece of improvisation, as the 3 guitarists lead each other through the song, meeting each other, parting here, drifting there, leading each other through passages, handing one over to the other in an intricate dancing interplay. It’s a Peggy-O like none other, soft, gentle, tinkling and trilling with Phil

accenting it with that special emphasis only he could impart and Jerry getting as lyrical as anyone ever has.

Four days later they opened the show with a Jack Straw that eventually rose to bombastic heights, thundering down from above. Dave Brown and I blew off a couple of days of school perilously close to finals to drive up from Durham to Huntington,WV. In and among all the rest of the stuff was this cute little Dire Wolf

It doesn’t matter if we listen to some old Doin’ that Rag from 1969,

or the twenty fingered acoustic guitar mastery of this impromptu Little Sadie

the beauty of the Grateful Dead was to be found in all the music they played.

I have a personal rule - I don’t ever pass up a Dark Star. That’s just my way. A ‘69 Dark Star>St Stephen> The Eleven is an opus. But those big songs aren’t all there is. The Grateful Dead lexicon is like coming across a new Christmas tree every day with myriad beautiful little ornaments to be explored and discovered.

Those are the songs that fill the air.

and here

on a summer evening with all your rods rigged with dry flies, a good friend at the oars, the casting arm limbered up and the fish ready to rise. This is the dry fly capital of the world, where trout rise with abandon to anything you can throw at them, as long as you throw it to the right place, at the right time. It’s attractor dry fly fishing at it’s best. But our attractors aren’t any of those other colorful and large things. They’re simply size 14 and 16 caddis flies, or a generic mayfly imitation. Sometimes I go wild and crazy and put one of each on the leader, other times I just stick to the caddis. Caddis adults make great attractors.

So great that I tie them by the seeming bucketful. In my way of thinking if there’s no hatch, and no regularly rising fish, then whatever you raise them on is an attractor pattern.

My regular fishing partner, Frank, loves fishing caddis dries to trout. We often fish little streams as a team. One rod, two anglers trading off after every fish as we make our way up a tight little water course. Since we’re sharing a rod we have to fish the same flies because changing flies for each guys turn is a chore. Our go to combination

for large parts of the year is a Double wing and a caddis. As an aside, I know I often mention two flies when talking about fishing dry flies. Our Western brethren understand, but for the Eastern folk - I don’t mean Double Wing OR caddis, I mean Double Wing AND caddis. Yes, precisely that - two dry flies on the leader at the same time. Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it. “If the thunder don’t get you, then the lightning will.”

Gary LaFontaine’s Double Wing is an elaborate attractor. Created by accident, but enshrining a lot of properties of a good attractor.

Here’s a spread of part of my collection of LaFontaine’s masterpiece, the Double Wing. These are the size 10s and 12s. I tie them down to 16s and some 18s.

However, an attractor doesn’t have to be anywhere near that elaborate. The caddis above are great attractors. The Adams is a general purpose, all round attractor dry fly - a sort of floating pheasant tail.

The key to an attractor pattern is that it brings up trout when there is no apparent surface activity. Attractor fishing with dry flies can be immensely productive under the correct conditions. There are many days where the only fish I see rising are the ones rising to my fly. But they do rise to my fly with amazing alacrity.

Way back in the 80s I used to fish (and guide) on the Delware River with my friend, the late, Bruce Bartlett. The Delaware is a wide river with huge pools, even in braided areas, often unmarked by surface structure. When there is a hatch the trout cruise these pools in loops from the tail of the pool to the head. When there isn’t a hatch it’s hard to pick a spot to throw a dry fly in order to attract a fish.

But you would often see what Bruce called the “One Time Sallies.” This was a trout that rose for no apparent reason. But we’ve all seen that, on just about any piece of water, at any time of year. A trout that rose for no apparent reason. This isn’t by sheer happenstance. There’s a reason for this sort of ad hoc behavior.

Unless there’s a hatch going on, or some sort of massed drift - behavioral or catastrophic, trout are by circumstance opportunity feeders. A trout’s vision is three-dimensional, there’s an azimuth and an elevation components at all times. Our vision is mainly pointed to the front with a fairly wide view from side to side and a narrow view top to bottom. But we have large blind zones.

A trout’s vision on the other hand has very small blind zones, and because of its monocular vision very wide coverage on both sides.

What that means is that trout are looking for food over about 330 degrees in elevation and 330 degrees in azimuth. But a trout’s vision lacks very severely in acuity. It just doesn’t see very well. It’s a bit like a shortsighted human without their glasses. They see color and forms and such but not the specifics. In fact a trout looking at a fly at any distance sees a sort of blur. This picture shows a human’s view of a fly from a foot (1A) and a trout seeing the same fly from 1ft (1B), 6 inches (1C) and 3 inches (1D).

And this is why flies use wholly unnatural artifacts to catch fish. The tinsel and metallic ribs used on nymphs are entirely unreal. A nymph like the Prince totally lacks in verisimilitude. A fly often used out West is a thing called the Lightning Bug, which might just have been the precursor of the Rainbow Warrior, except they tie it in sizes up to a 12.

Flies like this work by catching the trout’s attention. If you have trout lying in a spot where it’s relatively easy for them to rise a fly that catches their attention on the surface will have the exact same effect. We’ve all seen trout rise at random, to some utterly random bug floating down the river. Why wouldn’t they rise to a fly you’ve presented to them?

The answer is they will, at all times of the year. You just have to throw the right thing to them. Here are two fish, a wild brown and a wild rainbow, taken about 3 days apart on November 29 and December 2 about 100 miles apart, both on the exact same dry fly. Both were taken in mid sized rivers on relatively cold days.

Drawing a fish’s attention with a dry fly can sometimes be easier than it is with a nymph or other larval imitation. Once you’re into the late summer, fall and winter the size of mayfly nymphs and caddis larva present in streams goes down dramatically. Unlike things like stoneflies, these other insects, which often form a large percentage of subsurface life have a yearly life cycle. Which means after the spring and summer hatches we’re looking at aquatic macro invertebrates that may still be relatively small. Of course streams that have healthy populations of scuds and sow bugs can offset these insect populations, but only to a the extent that they exist in that stream. The reduced flows in fall and winter also lead to a commensurate ebb in the incidence of catastrophic drift. All this makes a trout reasonably likely to feed on the surface, opportunity permitting.

So, regardless of the time of year, fish will be looking at the surface - it’s what they do. What we have to do is present them a fly that grabs their attention. At times where the water is impacted by colored light, color in the fly can be a big factor. I talked about this in an earlier post.

This is where the LaFontaine Double Wing really comes into its own. It becomes a bright spot on the surface, unencumbered by the clutter and camouflage of subsurface environments. In the window of the trout’s view of the surface a colorful Double Wing is like a beacon on a bleak horizon. A bright spot silhouetted against the sky or a distant landscape as opposed to something drifting in an environment like this with its mottled backdrop. Remember the trout is seeing this with a lot less acuity than you are. To the trout it’s all one big blur.

But the surface is unencumbered. All we need is to get the trout’s attention. Obviously the form is one thing. But we put some dents and dimples in the surface, which causes bright lights due to the lens effects I talked about earlier. We also add some sparkle with our materials. We add a stark wing that appears in the window of the trout and we present a form that may be representative of food. That’s what a fly like the double wing does.

The Antron tail adds sparkle due to the material and also indents the surface. The rear wing has the surface trail like a caddis wing. The palmered hackle provides the lenses one associates with surface tension, the white wing is an attention getter and the color matches the ambient light. You’ve checked all the boxes.

In other conditions certain other flies may work just as well, or even better than the Double Wing. I tie my caddis in the style of LaFontaine’s dancing caddis without the fancy hook. A body that rests on the surface, a wing that presses down on the water’s meniscus and hackle to produce the dimpling of the legs. All things that cause that sparkly outline we see from things floating on the surface.

I also took a page out of LaFontaine’s surface sparkle emerger and added it to a fully winged caddis. The sparkle from the Antron bubble does wonders on the surface. The wings add a certain silhouette, blurred as it may be. But all we’re looking to do is that as the trout rises, drawn by all the visual commotion of the sparkles and color, we’re looking to provide just a bit of verisimilitude to our offering. This does it very well. And of course it also does work in places where the trout are used to seeing caddis flies in one way or another.

A mayfly imitation, such as the vaunted Adam’s does the same thing. As do things like the Wulff series of flies, or the Humpies, or a million other attractors. The Madam X’s and PMXs with their bulk and wiggly rubber legs, or the Chernobly series all do the same thing, build something that gets the trout’s attention, ether by creating a flash on the surface, or putting one there by the use of material, give it something to stand out against the background and don’t worry too much about what it looks like - the trout can’t tell.

My friend and one of the best flyfishing guides in the world, Kevin Wildgen, comes to visit me out East in the fall every so often. And we go fishing. A few years ago we went down to Tennessee and Kevin got to fish with another one of the super guides - Matt Murphy.

On a brisk, bright fall morning when the 52 degrees water could raise a mist against the 30 some degree air it was a sight to behold as Kevin proceeded to put a smacking on the Tennessee fish using a Chubby Chernobyl and a Royal PMX.

I can’t talk to trout. They seem to have no interest in talking to me. So I can’t, for the life of me tell you why trout take these flies. I can speculate and draw up arguments that match empirical observations, but this much I do know - fishing attractor dry flies is a legitimate way of taking trout on the surface. Especially in the fall, even on itty bitty little streams like this one.

where trout like this will merrily rise up and take a relevant attractor. (That must have been the first fish on that rod, the grip being completely devoid of any signs of use.)

Trout, especially browns are negatively phototropic. That’s a fancy way of describing their vampire like aversion to light. But as the shadows lengthen, and the light dims these fish will emerge to lie in the little runs and potholes that form the shoreline of any river.

Come down a river like this, as the light fades, and probe those seams along the shore or the mid river holes with a pair of floating flies, and despite the snow clad slopes looking down at you those fish will rise up to your flies. I know, I’ve been there, I’ve done that, and I’ve caught those fish.

An elegant physical design, lyric tones flowing in a cascade of color, with rhythm and timbre, rising and falling to accentuate the melody are qualities by which all graceful instruments are known. They make the music soar, and ripple and rise in waves, or glide effortlessly. Warm and rich with deep resonance, or cool and light and airy trilling their way through in soft gossamer tendrils.

They aren’t from the world of the boldly unapologetic aesthetic of the Silver Doctor

Or the strident parrot hues of the Green Highlander

But rather the flowing sweep of a Spey variant of a Green Butt Skunk.

Or the ephemeral lightness of a Coffin Fly, pale and shimmering in monochromatic splendor.

Or the lightness of being of a Hendrickson Dun, cast in that pale pink tone

so sought for by a multitude.

In the sharply delineated form of a darker pheasant tail soft hackle

or the blowsy, ethereal carefree form of a lighter, teased out one.

It can be found in the clear, clean lines of a small winter stonefly

or a fluttering caddis

You can find the grace in a nymph

Or even a lowly Wooly Bugger

I tie flies. That is what I do. Sometimes I look at them and delight in what I have done.

And sometimes in the fish they catch

There are regions of the world where rivers, even big large ones are truly glacier fed. As the winter snows recede from the lower altitudes the rivers start sourcing their water from glaciers or permanent snow fields. We don’t have many of those in North America but I have fished the milky waters of those rivers in the Swiss Alps or this river pictured here in the Himalayas in India. These rivers flow cold all summer long but have a relatively short growing period for trout and their food.

In all other areas trout streams are fed by subterranean water source - essentially springs of one sort or another. These streams also fall into two categories, those fed from aquifers or those fed from water trapped in localized rock fissures and gravel or sand banks close to the surface. The second category is what we see in Western mountain rivers, where the winter snow mass feeds these fissures and other holding areas and the water works its way out to the streams once the snow is gone. A lot of those streams show marked heating during the day time, because the water comes up from relatively close to the surface and the area gets rapidly heated up the sun.

I digress, but there’s a tale here. People of a certain age all seem to remember where they were when the heard JFK had been assassinated. I was a young lad of almost 5, and I remember because our neighbor came in and told my parents early on the morning of November 24, 1962, a Saturday when I was home from school. And that’s where this starts getting interesting. We found out, seemingly a day later because we were overseas. My father was an army officer. I don’t know if they still do, but back then the US Army and the Indian Army would trade officers for cross training in each other’s military DOTMLPF. In 1962 Dad was at the Defense Services Staff College in the quaint little military town of Wellington, in of all places, the southern peninsular part of India. This is tropical country, set at a latitude of about 12 degrees north with an average altitude of about 6,000 ft.

A land of rolling deciduous trees, stretches of rain forest and tea plantations on tiered mountain sides.

And there’s the magic. The altitude and the winter monsoons brought on by the South East Trade winds blowing in over the southern Indian ocean. The Nilgiris, once you get past the foothills have an annual average temperature of 59F and lots of water in the aquifers. And no snow ever. With the exception of the foliage the area is reminiscent of the English Downs or the Lake District.

And all of its streams flow out of aquifers in an area with an annual average temperature of 59 degrees. That’s important because the aquifers tend to maintain water temperatures at that annual value. These little streams coalesce in the valleys leading to bigger rivers. I caught my first trout on a fly rod on a stream in Parson’s Valley in the Nilgiris. It was a stream bred rainbow that ate a small wet fly of some kind, in a stream like this:

We’d go find the riffles, Dad would cast and hand me the rod, and I’d let the fly swing until voila! - fish on. If we could find trout in Southern India, where they were brought from Sri Lanka, we sure as shooting should be able to find trout in the Eastern United States all year round. And you can. Just like this stream in late July

that produced this nice brown trout from the hole in front of that tree (in fact it produced about 4 fish before all the yelling and shouting was done).

If you look at the Mid Atlantic and southern New England states the mean annual temperature ranges from about 55 degrees for central Maryland down to about 49 degrees around Saratoga Springs, NY.

Brown trout have a peculiar sort of response to temperature. they have a very large range in which they remain healthy, from just above freezing to about 65-66F. Then their health plummets rapidly between 66 and 70 degrees Fahrenheit. However, various studies have shown that trout that have been acclimatized to warmer temperatures as they grow can survive in warmer water. However, it would still be foolhardy to fish for them once the water temperatures exceed 67 degrees or thereabout.

But, 67 degrees still gives one about 12-18 degrees of headroom, if not more. ALL the groundwater that flows into ANY stream does so at the mean annual temperature for the region. That means that every stream you see gets its water at that temperature. If it comes bubbling out of one big spring such as some spring creeks do, that water is at the same temperature as the constant inflow of water into what we call “freestoners.” In this part of the work both these streams are spring creeks, even though we may only call the top one by that name.

And they both produce fish like this

And as long as the Earth keeps pumping water into these rivers at a constant 55F we and the trout have a fighting chance.

A stream, any stream in the Eastern US (or the rest of the world for that matter) starts as an outflow from a spring. As it moves down its course it is met by another output from a spring and then another and so on. These trickles develop into creeks, and then the creeks merge into smaller rivers which merge into bigger rivers and so on. In the areas I’m talking about all the water that forms these rivers starts at a temperature somewhere in the 40s or 50s. As the stream moves along this cold water is warmed by two phenomena - solar heating and convection. The sun beats down on the water and its energy is absorbed by both the water and the stream bed. Most of the absorption happens within the first couple of inches of water, which is a saving grace because it allows the deeper water to remain cool, at least for a period before everything mixes together in a riffle. The other phenomenon is the transfer of heat from the air to the water due to the difference in temperature. Energy flows from a high energy state (high temperature) to a lower energy state (lower temperature) and so warm air tends to warm cooler water.

So the cooler waters flowing into the streams are now fighting the warmer air and sun to see who gets the upper hand. Streams that have a huge influx of cold water can maintain a cold flow over a longer reach than those who get little trickles of cold flow. This is why spring creeks maintain the 50-some degree water temperature over a longer stretch. But even the tinniest stream in our part of the world is fed by cold spring water. If that stream grows in volume the water is either coming from a tributary or more springs. The tributaries themselves are of course once again spring fed. It doesn’t matter if you’re at low summer flows or heavier spring flows. Unless the water has been raised by warm rain (as often happens in the Eastern US) the water in the stream has a cold source.

There is a river my Buddy Frank and I fish over a length of about 50 miles. It starts off as a little spring creek

Three or four miles down it’s still a meadow spring creek

Ten miles further along it is now something we would call a freestoner, with mid-summer flows like this

and nice, chunky small stream trout

Another 25-30 miles downstream it’s a smallish river, and these are low winter flows.

Another fifteen river miles down it’s a nice sized trout river river

with low season flows around 200-ish cfs. And nice trout

I fish for trout over a 60 mile stretch of this river in all months of the year. But there is a trick to this, that is fully illustrative of the heat transfer effects we talked about earlier. In the summer months, as you move down this river, you’ll find chunks of it almost entirely devoid of trout life with water temperatures in the 70-72 degree range. Go down a quarter of a mile, or a mile and the water temperature drops down to 62-64, even in the heat of summer. Another few miles down the river the phenomenon gets repeated. Along the way there are large spring seeps, or little creeks that dump water in at 52-55 degrees.On those dog day July and August afternoons, as the leaves hang listless covered with a layer of our typical mid summer drought dust the cool waters of the river are a deep comfort, especially since you’re actually catching trout.

This river makes it through the summer because of it’s rich inflow of cold water through numerous springs and small feeder creeks. But there is another way rivers stay cool in the summer - by avoiding the heating caused by the sun and warm air.

Take a section of stream like this

Very little sunlight actually gets down to the water. Or this one

Both these streams are very interesting. They start about 6-8 miles upstream of where these pictures were taken as small meadow streams. After about a couple of miles they are unsuitable for trout come the dead of summer. a few miles later they get an influx of cold water and get into the shade and become veritable trout havens with some truly pretty fish

The lower stream is interesting because I have rarely seen its temperature rise above 64 degrees in the two miles of wooded land it flows through. About 400 yards down from where this picture was taken another cold stream flows into it making it a much larger stream

But it also opens up and on a hot summer day the water will rise 4 degrees over the next half a mile making it unsuitable for fishing for another couple of miles when it again enters the woods and gets a slug of cool water.

One of my favorite trout streams is another one of these woodland streams.

Except this guy is full of fish like these

At some stage, about 6-8 miles down from where it first forms by the confluence of 3 smaller streams it flows into a long meadow section with two spring creeks flowing into it. One actually holds a population of wild rainbows, a rarity in the mid Atlantic region. During the prime months these fish will drop into the main stream and get chunky enough to whack this big ugly streamer.

Once the summer comes most of these fish vanish from the meadow areas, releasing them to smallmouths. As one makes his way further down stream the river’s trout steadily give way to smallmouth bass until another 8 miles downstream where a bunch of large and small spring creeks flow in, and the limestone bottom is a maze of springs. You can feel the cool springs bubbling up as you wade that section in summer. And it’s trout territory again, albeit in a much larger stream.

With a healthy head of well fed trout

Trees offer another advantage. As the air warms the water, the water cools the air. The canopy has an insulating effect on this cooled air, and the layer of trapped air stops further warming of the water. On some of these rivers we fish it is nothing to come down into the woods to be met by river mist in July and August, when the outside temperature is in the 90s and the area around the stream is in the low 70s. The mid-Atlantic humidity though condenses

This is one of those streams at 2;41PM on July 28th. I still remember the day vividly because there was quite the stir at home as I announced my plan to go fishing, it being about 98 degrees and my wife kept trying to remind me that I was neither a mad dog nor an Englishman.

The gist of all this is that even in the hottest of months (at least so far) there is trout fishing to be had in the east. And good fishing, not just marginal stuff. This isn’t just for name’s sake. It’s an honest endeavor. You just have to find the water. Obviosly you can start with the well known stuff and look for cooler spots, move upstream and down with a stream thermometer in hand. But look at other waters too. Pay particular attention to wooded areas, or areas where smaller tributaries flow in. Some of those tributaries can be surprising.

This little stream Frank’s fishing flows at about 52 degrees all year round. And where it dumps into a bigger river it forms a nice cold slug for about a quarter of a mile, at which point a larger stream, albeit a little warmer flows into the main river in the valley. This stream probably dumps water in at 57-60 degrees.

Between these two, and some in river springs the main river provides great fishing for another 2 or more miles before warming into smallmouth water.

So, explore. And the best time to do it is actually in the summer because that’s when you’ll find the spots. Woods are an obvious thing to look for, a sudden increase in stream fow is another, small tributaries do the same thing.

Ask around locally. As i get to my dotage I don’t mind telling you good folk a secret once in a while. Discovering good fishing often boils down to asking the right question. One such question, that has led me to more great trout water than anything else is to ask if there are streams where they used to stock trout but they don’t anymore. Every yahoo in every country store or gas station will be happy to tell you how the Government is useless now. They used to stock all these streams and they don’t any more - the cheap no good bastards. Head there. There’s a reason these no good Fish and Wildlife people stop stocking streams. A lot of times it’s to quietly protect a self sustaining population of fish. They won’t publicize it but you can find the fish there. Also look up and downstream of where they do stock now. If the stream has patches of cold water, the fish will find them. Once they find them they’ll, more often than not spawn and their progeny will do so too.

Look around, because the trout waters are there

and the fish are there all the way from here

to here

You just have to find them.

There is a river I fish. It flows through woods and meadows, its clean cobblestone and gravel bed a veritable nursery for a diverse variety of creatures. Along its length it is fed by many a spring creek, both big and small.

They keep the water at a nice temperature all year around, they provide spawning and sanctuary waters for the fish, they provide the right stuff. And the stream has trout. Does it ever have trout. Colorful slabs of speckled gold, with stark white underbellies. One of its tributaries has a breeding population of pretty little rainbows, a few of whom make their way downstream to grown into chunky, and not so small rainbows.

Given fair winds and following seas it is a mere hour and ten minutes from my home, skirting past halls of power, hordes of lobbyists in dark suits and corporate lawyers in cordovan shoes. You leave all that behind for the burble of soft waters, the chirping of woodland songbirds and the occasional drone of some light propeller aircraft casting a somnolent spell over everything. The background is often disturbed by the blip of a trout taking something off the surface.

There is a corner of Northeastern Tennessee that is full of rolling pastureland nestled amongst the wooded foothills of the Great Smokey Mountains.

Great big rivers flow through this area, with clear cold water and lots of trout. Mayflies and caddis hatch in droves, the fish rise up just like birds. It’s a longish afternoon’s drive from our home, leave by noon, in by six, or so. The mornings on the riverbank cottage are reminiscent of Pippa’s song

 The year's at the spring,
And day's at the morn;
Morning's at seven;
The hill-side's dew-pearl'd;
The lark's on the wing;
The snail's on the thorn;
God's in His heaven—All's right with the world!
                                                                   -Robert Browning

Greet the morning air with song

The madding rush of guides and outfitters dies with the first hour of the fishing day. Gone are the dozens long lines of drift boats and trucks and trailers and guides and anglers all bent on the perfectly choreographed outing. The rivers are still there, so are the fish.

They rise with languid purpose, once, twice, three times. No one’s in a hurry, you don’t have to be anywhere, they’re already where they need to be, and sometimes they even oblige by taking your fly.

The Roaring Fork rises way up in the snows of Independence Pass. It flows through the gilded opulence of Aspen and through its outer suburbs around Snowmass. As the valley levels out it flows into ranch land and alfaalfa fields. Winter and summer are hectic with the tourists, but as fall creeps in the air gets a slight nip, snows start appearing in the upper reaches, the aspens turn golden, the grassland yellow.

The elk and bighorn start making their way down into the valleys, flights of mallards and pintail show up on the river pools. The ants, beetles and hoppers still thaw out in the midday sun getting in the last bit of activity for the year. The air is clean and redolent with pine and juniper, the colors snap, the sky is vivid in its blueness

and you can “listen to the river sing sweet songs to rock your soul.”

Midges and blue winged olives drift the seams in the morning. Red Quill spinners and caddis come down in the evening. Every once in a while you see an elk or even a bear going about its last business of the year along the banks. Sometimes a snow squall catches you, dusting the banks and bushes.

And you drift along with a good friend, talking of this, that and the other, children now grown, wives you are still madly in love with, the beauty of the land, the waters and the fish.

Beautiful destinations and days well spent.

The trout rivers of Eastern Tennessee are hydroelectric rivers in the TVA grid. The releases from the dams are timed to meet electric demands which means they normally go down at night and kick up at different times of the day. In the summer months there is a huge upsurge in demand during the hottest part of the day and until the night sets in fully. The strange things about these rivers is that some of them fish well during high water times and others during low water periods. During any given day there’s a good chance you’ll only get a half day of good fishing, if that. It has to be a dilemma for the guides. Except for the really good ones.

Fly fishing guides come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Some are excellent, some average, some not so good and some just downright lousy. That probably goes for their clients too. But most of what you hear about guides, guiding and their clients comes from the guides, or professional writers who get treated with kid gloves.

You also rarely read anything written by the clients about what they actually expect from guides. If what my friends who are guides tell me is true, this is because most clients are out for the first time, just as a passing lark, and really have nothing to gauge their guide by. Those who are regulars settle in with their regular guides and everyone is fat, dumb and happy.

But is that really true?

I’m sure it isn’t.

As a sport who has fished with guides far and wide, I think there are just too many guides who miss the gist of the service they are providing. At least to the discerning angler. The answers to that simple question, what is the service I am providing, would probably go a long way.

Some anglers hire guides, especially at destination locations because it’s a way to get the experience of having gone fly fishing. Others do it to learn. This piece is not from their point of view. Those people may eventually become regulars, and if they do, they will eventually end up where seasoned anglers find themselves. This is a piece for the guide from the point of view of the seasoned angler. But it applies to every client a guide may have.

We, the seasoned anglers, hire guides because they form the second half of the team required to fish that water successfully. But the novice needs a guide for the very same reason.

In order for that to happen the guide has to be as invested in the success of the venture as the sport. That’s the prime motivation. And the first thing there is choosing the best time to fish. I understand the motivation to have a steady 9-5 job, be home every evening at a respectable time so that one can spend time with family and friends. But what do you do if the best fishing is from 5-9? Asking your sport to quit at 5 is a bit like a chef saying his restaurant only serves dinner from 3-5. Maybe he’ll get some business in a community with a lot of old folks, but he shouldn’t expect to run a successful dinner business in, say, New York City. Maybe that trade isn’t best suited for him. In certain parts of the country, if you want to have the best sport you’re probably going to leave the water when it’s like this.

But I know the guides fail at this all the time. I say that because there are always times, almost on any day when I’m having a blast on the water, where we are the only people on the water. These are often very popular rivers and the times when people should be fishing should not be a mystery to the guides. But it seems to be. 50 boats may go down a section of river on a day, and only 1 gets to the prime spots at the prime time. That’s great for the one guy who’s guide got him there at that time. But imagine the poor saps who didn’t get to experience that.

A guide needs to accommodate for the best fishing times. One of the best guides I’ve fish with, Kevin Wildgen of Edwards Colorado, often meets me, in the summer, for lunch at noon and then we go fishing. By the time we hit the water it’s 2PM and we fish it through to dark. We’ll throw some hoppers and terrestrials till about 5, and then shift to caddis and spinners and fish out the day. 75-100 fish days aren’t uncommon. That’s Kevin at the top of the post. In the fall and winter, when the snows start showing up we’ll switch it around, grab breakfast and hit the water as it starts warming. And we’ll be off the water before it gets dark and cold.

And we get to work fish rising to BWOs and midges during the warm part of the day

Another of the really great guides I fish with is Matt Murphy of Bristol, TN. Matt is another one of those guides who adjusts his schedule to give his sport the best shot at

at fishing the way the sport likes fishing. Matt works the TVA dams where releases happen at all times of the day. And it’s actually a very simple thing to cover. But go to a river with an early morning release and you’ll see the boats lined up at the ramps at 8 AM. Hatches on a river like the Watauga, that sees morning releases, typically don’t start till 10-11 AM. The high water will probably catch up to you at some time during the day. If you’re further up stream it’ll get to you by 2-3PM. By which time the afternoon release river will be coming into its prime. We’ll often fish two rivers in one day. This brown was taken during a morning hatch on the Watauga. Then we take the afternoon off. I do my stuff, Matt goes about his chores and stuff for the day and we get back together to fish the South Holston in the evening when the Sulphurs are hatching and the spinners come down.

The point here is that a guide should take you fishing when the fishing is at its best. Nothing’s worse than leaving rising fish, or finding rising fish at the ramp, because the guide needs to get off the water at 5. It just isn’t good service.

While guides may see a lot of novice fishermen, every once in a while they will come across one who isn’t. Or one who fishes a lot. Often more than that guide, or any guide can. Guides spend a lot of time on the water, but not a lot actually wielding a rod. I know many an angler who fishes upwards of a hundred days a year. There aren’t that many guides who can afford to fish that often. These anglers know a lot and have great skills. They’re the ones who can catch the fish if you let them or put them in a position to do so. Too often guides can’t recognize these anglers. And that is helpful to no one. Guides should talk to their clients, get to know them, find out what they can and can’t do and then use that knowledge to best position them to catch their fish.

Anglers develop their favorite ways to fish. Some like slinging streamers, others don’t want to have anything to do with throwing half a chicken across the river. Some don’t mind chucking nymphs under a bobber, and others would rather fish a dry dropper. And yet others may like to just seek out rising fish, if available, and work them. A good guide finds out what an angler wants to do and then helps get him into a position to do this. Another one of my favorite guides, Rick Smith, needs mentioning, firstly because anyone who can lay out a single spey like Rick needs mentioning.

But more importantly because in a world where such a thing is rare, Rick is willing to take me to look for steelhead that will rise to dry flies or fish flies like this to catch fish like this.

For a lot of anglers it isn’t just catching the fish that counts. Often it’s how the fish is caught that counts more. My regular fishing partner will spend hours stalking the individual rising fish to take them on a dry fly rather than dunk nymphs. That, to him is the joy of fishing. Obviously if it isn’t possible one will resort to other tactics, but most seasoned anglers have a way in which they want to go about their day. As Matt Murphy once said, “It’s your money. If that’s how you want to spend it then let’s go do it.” Too many guides don’t do that. Yes, I understand there are anglers who’ll throw a fit if the guide doesn’t put them into fish, any old way. But it pays to get the cut of the angler’s jib to see what they would like to do. After all, as Matt rightfully noted, it’s their money, let them spend it the way they want to.

One thing very few guides do is ask the angler what they expect from the guide. The guide is providing a service. The angler is acquiring the service. The guide might know what he wants to provide. Wouldn’t it help to know what the sport expects to get? Talk it over. Give the client your ideas, get his ideas and see what you can figure out. Some of my best days have come from that sort of give and take. It’s led to fishing cold snowy days with leaden skies

with small BWOs and midges to fish sipping in the seams with Kevin Wildgen because I thought it was the right day for it

or fishing to trout sipping midges early in the morning as the river mist was lifting on the South Holston, when they weren’t releasing any water out of the dam, because Matt Murphy knew that was something I had to try.

A long time ago, in a world long since gone, as a grad student I did a bunch of guiding. I found that the most exciting days came when you had a client who could do what needed doing and you put him on the fish that needed the doing. And the fish got caught. The second best type of day was when your client turns you onto a fly or tactic that you didn’t know of, and then promptly uses it to knock the fish for a loop. Too many guides don’t ever see that because they’re not willing to push the client to “go for it” and aren’t willing to listen to what the client may have to offer up.

What good guiding really boils down to is a simple set of rules. First, remember you’re selling a service. Good business means putting forth the best offering at the best time for the convenience of the customer.

Second, gauge the customers’ expectations and try to fulfill them, as long as they are just and reasonable. If you can’t do that, let the customer know. If all your river has at that time of the year is evening activity and you have other commitments at that time don’t row some poor schmuck down the river telling him he should have been here last week.

Third, no matter how experienced you are, there is always the chance there’s someone who’s been doing it longer, does it more often and might be better at it than you are. Learn to recognize that client and see how best to accommodate them. You might even learn a thing or two.

Lastly, it’s their money. Let them spend it the way they want to. You can and should tell them if there’s a better way, but if they want to do something, and it pleases them, and it isn’t illegal, immoral or possibly fattening, then go ahead and do it.

Fly fishing clients are out there to have a good time. The guide should find out what that means, and to the best of their ability let the client have what the client defines as a good time. That is all there is to it.

A few miles downstream of the small town of Kremmling the Blue River flows into the Colorado in a long gently flowing flat area of veritable lake-like water. There is no indication of what lies ahead. A mile or so past the confluence the Colorado drops into Gore Canyon with its thousand foot sandstone cliff walls and a continuous miles long section of Class IV and V rapids.

The river exits Gore Canyon at an area called Pumphouse. Gone, for the nonce, are the steep canyon walls and the vista opens into rolling hills of chalky soil covered with sage and rabbit brush with occasional pinyon pines and juniper trees. Along one braid on the left bank are a pair of boat ramps, the last bit of easy access to the area until about 4 miles downstream at the Radium access area.

And from Radium down its another 5 miles to Rancho del Rio. This section forms the head of a 27-mile stretch of the Colorado river that flows either through remote arid areas without roads or through huge tracts of ranch land, without roads and ranchers normally not given to allowing people to fish on their land.

This is also the land of chunky, hard fighting trout, raised on liberal doses of various stoneflies, caddis and mayflies. Colorado’s surveys puts the median fish size at about 14”. That means half the fish population in this section is over 14-inches long. This fish, albeit in post spawn, would be run of the mill in that area.

This, not so much

But like someone once said, you can’t get there from here. Except of course in a drift boat, which is how I fish it with my friend and super duper guide Kevin Wildgen.

What we’re fishing in are descendants of the Mackenzie River drift boats who themselves were descendants of the fishing scows or dories used off the Iberian coast. The Mackenzie had a squared of stern. It’s cousin, the Rogue River drift boat, like the one being rowed here by Zane Grey had a pointed prow and stern.

Today’s drift boat is a flat bottomed boat, often with a variety of clever things done to the bottom to improve handling, low in profile to better handle the wind with an extremely wide beam to provide a stable platform.

My first experience with a drift boat was with an old Hyde aluminum monstrosity that had sides about 3 feet high and weighed about half a ton. Today’s boats are a charm compared to that thing.

The drift boat makes an excellent fishing platform, A good oarsman and a good angler in the bow are a sight to watch. I have the enviable advantage of fishing with 2 of the best drift boat handlers I have ever come across - the aforementioned Kevin in Colorado (here being guided on a wade trip on one of my streams by yours truly)

and my buddy Matt Murphy in Eastern Tennessee, doing his bit here as a super guide.

This piece isn’t about how to row a drifty, or what to look for in one or anything to do with the boat itself. This is purely from an angler’s point of view. What is it that you, the angler, can do to take full advantage of the boat and all it has to offer.

Let’s start with my first rule of drift boat fishing - I think it ought to be unconstitutional to have more than one angler in the boat. It’s a headache for the guide it’s a headache for the anglers, it’s especially a headache for the angler who is more adept at his tasks. If you need to, I would advise you go out on half as many days as you would if you could split the cost. You’ll enjoy yourself more than you would on twice as many days of the misery that comes with two angler on the boat. My buddy Frank and I often go out together, but we split guide and angler duties. He guides, I fish, (here he is in the back on the oars)

then I guide and he fishes.

Of course that requires both to know how to handle a boat. We’ve been fishing partners for 40 years, but we would never share a boat and guide. The problem always boils down to how you share the fishing. Two anglers, flailing away is a formula for disaster. So people have to come up with a way to split the time. And there’s just no way to do that and not ruffle feathers. If you do it by time, then the drift will always be at the prime spot when the grass is greener on the other guy’s side. If you split it by 1 fish each, your boat mate will be the most inept caster, who couldn’t mend his line if his life depended on it and setting a hook is something he considers below his meagre intellect. And the poor guide has to figure out how to get Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum to both catch fish. Oh, the humanity!

Rule number two - don’t sit and fish, unless you absolutely have to. Nature gave you two legs and a drifty so you could stand in a boat and fish. This is Frank trying to work a pod of finnicky rising fishing. I filmed it while standing at the oars behind him, but imagine his view standing, and the clear room he has to cast and manage line. You can’t get that sitting down. Plus standing up gives a much better, and often

glare free view of the water. It allows you to pick the spots to hit, the pockets and divots, and runs and seams that hold the fish. Sitting down, all of that is lost.

The added height also allows you to lift your line above the guide sitting at his rowing spot. If you’re a right handed caster and in the front of the boat, the left bank can be attacked while keeping the line away from the guide. The right bank now either requires you to cast back (or cat) handed, or lift the line way above the guide so you don’t hook him or her. Guides don’t like getting hooked, or smacked by split shot. Standing up allows you to do that easily.

Rule number three - carry as many rods as you possibly can. If you don’t own many, ask the guide to provide some. Rig them up ahead of time. As you come rolling down this section of the Roaring Fork, in the evening, and if you have it timed right, you cast along the right bank and you’ll find the fish stacked up like cordwood.

Until you reach the spot this picture was taken from you have a steady, fast clipped run of about a mile, where the oarsman has no chance of being able to pull over due to private property rights and the current won’t allow him to slow down much beyond allowing you to fish. But fished correctly by both the angler and the rower that run should provide you 10-12 fish. break a fish off, leave a fly on the bank, get your flies chewed up, and if you can’t reach down and grab another rod, that catastrophe defines how many fish the run produced for you. This sort of thing is particularly true out west where arcane property rules might allow you to drift a section of river, but they won’t allow you to anchor.

Rule number four - a corollary to number 3. Get adept at rigging your own set up. The guide will show you what’s needed if you are new to the river. But rely on tying on your own stuff. Let the oarsman do what he’s supposed to be doing - working the boat, looking for fish and the all that sort of stuff. He’ll appreciate it. The more he get’s to pay attention to what he’s supposed to be doing, the better it will be for everyone. I carry all my own gear onto a boat, short of the landing net. That’s just me. But it doesn’t hurt to carry, at the very least, your own tippet material, desiccant, dry fly floatant, nippers and hemostats.

Now you’re in the boat and on your way. You can, if you or the guide wish, use the boat as transport and drift from spot to spot, and fish those spots thoroughly. Or you can drift along fishing all the water you go through. I like the later with one exception. I love setting up on a pod of rising fish, like the one I had Frank on in the video above, or these ones where we have Matt on the oars and me on the rod.

We got 3 of them before they went down. These were the lower Watauga wild ‘bows.

Fishing from a moving drift boat is a dynamic thing. Some of it comes at you very quickly. Other stuff allows you to fish spots in a way you could never do on foot. This section of the Colorado, in Glenwood Canyon has sections of the river where gravel banks slide into the river. the constant flow regime during large parts of the year creates a shelf on these gravel banks.

Put a dry dropper down about a foot off shore and you can fish in until you either catch a fish of the whole bank has been fished. All it needs is good line control. You can also nudge the flies in closer to shore or pull them out a bit without having to pick up and recast. The same thing holds for areas where you have a deep drop off close to shore.

At the same time, the spots you need to hit might come at you fast and furious. This is a section of the Colorado below State’s Bridge. You’re going to want to hit all of those red ovals as you drive by, and by the time you get to the Red arrow, you’re going to be fishing the other bank, which you will be able to tap comfortably for the rest of the drift in this picture.

I like fishing this sort of water with either attractor dries or dry-dropper combinations. The trick is to cast way ahead of yourself, do a quick stack mend or two. That lets the droppers sink down and puts the dry in the correct position to note a take. Fish it through the spot, lift, hit the next. Once you’ve fished the stretches of river a few times you’ll recognize the spots. In the meantime, a good guide can mostly just point you to the bank and it’s your job to read the water and drop the fly in. Look at these spots. What’s he going to say to identify most of them? Once your fly is on the water he has a better chance, “2 feet further in, or 5 feet downstream, closer to the seam,” something like that. But you need to put it in the general vicinity on your own. And in there’s another key to success in fishing from a drift boat. Keep looking to the front, cat to the front, unless you’re anchored up and have reason to cast behind you. that’s where you’re headed, that’s where all the action will be. If you try and cast level or behind the boat the boat willtend to pull your fly out of the zone. An occasional cast to hit a spot is okay, but the general trend should be pointing forward.

A small breather. Here’s a Colorado River fish to look at before we move on.

Learn how to mend line. Unless you’re anchored up the boat is moving, the water is moving, the rate at which they move with respect to each other keeps changing, the water between you and the fly keeps changing, and so does the distance. This means you need to constantly manage your line with little and big mends, changes of length etc. Watch this young lady correct her line with just the slightest mend and get rewarded. It’s a beautiful sight.

One big difference between wade fishing and boat fishing is the possible theater of operation. Wade fishing restricts you to the region you can wade to in a reasonable period of time. That’s the area that needs your attention. Drifting, your theater of operation could be the entire width of the river for a distance of several hundred feet.

This is the Colorado between Two Bridges and Catamount. Looks like pretty froggy water but it actually has a nice current running along both banks. In the summer, especially in the afternoon, the mountain winds kick up and deposit all sorts of beasties right along the banks. The fish will show themselves and if you, and the guide mark thems you can criss-cross the flats fishing for them.

In the fall we find BWOs and feeding fish along the same banks. A little pod here, a little pod there and if you keep your eyes focussed widely across the stream you can pick them up. It’s an art, but one easy to learn - concentrating in wide angled view, keeping an eye on your fly and your surroundings. The beauty of fishing from a drifty is that you can in fact hit all those spots.

This business of a wide area focus is something one must get a grasp of to get the best of fishing out of a drift boat.

I had used this picture of the Watauga for illustrating the need tor stack mending in another article. Standing up in a drifty every nook and cranny stands out . As you drift down you can figure out where to place your next cast. But that’s going to be some place downstream of your current position and across a wide swatch of river. You fly, at this moment is somewhere short of that location. You need to be able to track that fly as well as the next spot to place your cast. Your guide, if he knows the river is watching the right bank, under those trees for any rising fish.

If you’ve fished from a drifty, with an even halfway reasonable guide, you’ve probably wondered how they can manage to keep an eye on your fly or strike indicator, the river rocks and be able to spot a fish rising 50 yards or more down river, all at the same time. That’s the wide angle view I’m talking about. It’s actually very easy to do, just relax your eyes and the muscles around them and focus a bit into the distance. The human eyes have a field of view of almost 180 degrees, if left to their own devices. Position your head to keep your fly, or indicator, about 30% into the upstream part of your vision, and now just slowly move your point of view through about 25% and then back again.

You never lose sight of your fly, and yet have a view of the stream, the holding spots, current seams, place to cast to next, any possible fish movement and everything else. It’s easy to get a grasp of it, as long as you know that it needs doing.

Most any tackle you have will do, but there are two things that will make your life a lot easier - the first is a long rod. If there is any speed difference between you and the place the fly is fishing, a long rod will help keep line off the water. It will also help mend line and allow you to lift more line off the water. The second thing is the taper of the fly line. I have a whole article on fly lines and discuss tapers in great detail:

Suffice it to say that if you’re used to fishing out to about 40 ft something like the Orvis Pro trout has a good taper. If you can fish further than that, even the Orvis line is about as useful as teats on a boar hog. I’ve just taken to fishing double taper lines when fishing bigger rivers from a drifty.

A drift boat offers a great platform to fish from, let’s you get places where there often is no other option like these stretches of the Colorado that are hot hopper haunts in the heat of summer

and it can also just be a fun ride.

But the way you fish from them can be a surprise to someone who hasn’t been on one. If you haven’t I would urge you to try it, and hopefully this article will help. You catch a lot of fish from them too.

Fly fishers are a funny breed. They’ll pay a thousand dollars for a rod, six hundred for waders, nine hundred for a reel and throw a hissy fit if asked to pay fifty cents for the hook. The rod will cast the line, the waders will keep them dry, the reel will, for the most part hold their line, but that paltry 50 cent piece of metal is what will hold the fish. And yet they write reviews for every model of rod, people collect reels like they were fine wines and they high modulus this and bar stock that, yet ignore the thing that finally actually hooks the fish (Oh look I made a pun.)

As a young lad I made and used flies tied on whatever hook was at hand. As a not so young lad I gravitated towards Mustad hooks because that’s what you did. It wasn’t until I became a young man that I realized this is not a hook designed to catch fish

But if you looked at what the various writers and experts were telling you, hook selection mattered. Capt Hamilton, from New Zealand had Partridge make him a set of hooks that became the L series - the L2A was a heavy wet fly hook, the L3A a standard dry fly hook and the L4A a light wire hook.

Vince Marinaro, the wizard of the Letort had Partridge make him a special midge hook, sold by them as the K1A.

Orvis had Sealey’s in England make them a dry fly hook they called the Premium. That hook was designed by a guy called Ken Hooper who later worked for Partridge. He designed a pair of dry fly hooks for Partridge based on the Orvis Premium - the E1A and the E6A.

Partridge designed and built hooks for all sorts of special purposes and a lot of their DNA can be seen in various hooks today.

It was 1983 and I had just finished my Masters and started in on my doctoral work. I got a job at the erstwhile Rockville Trading Post running their flyfishing department. Here was my chance to do something with everything I had read until then. I tracked down the Partridge international sales folks in Redditch and they put me in touch with a little distributor in New England somewhere (40 some years later the details are fading) and we got in a load of Partridge hooks. Not knowing how they’d sell I only got in 100 of each type and size, and they were packaged in lots of 25 hooks. We sold these hooks for between $4.75 and $5.25 a package. That’s between 19 and 21 cents a hook. People threw a hissy fit. It took a lot of work to convince people that when that 20-incher rose to your #18 BWO it was worth paying 19 cents to see that you actually hooked it, and once hooked, it was worth paying the grandiose sum of 19 cents to increase your chances of landing it. It took time, it was work, but we started bringing people around. Then the Japanese hooks started showing up. I called over to Dan Bailey’s and bought a pack of #4 and #6 streamer hooks from both Tiemco and DaiRiki. I would break them with 5 or 6X tippet just to show their fundamental flaw.

Then sometime in the 90s it all went to pot. Mustad bought Partridge and proceeded to trash their product.

Anyhow, enough reminiscing. Let’s talk hooks now. A fly hook has two primary purposes - it provides a base for you to tie a fly on, and it is responsible for hooking the fish and keeping it hooked until you land it.

A quick look at the anatomy of a hook, since I will use these terms throughout the rest of this discussion.

The shank is where you tie your fly and obviously the shank length is determined by the size of fly you’re trying to tie. The gape, which is the distance between the shank and the point governs the hooks ability to grab a fish and then, in part, hold onto it. The bite is the other part that governs the ability of the hook to hang onto a fish. It is no surprise that the European Tournament anglers (God have mercy on their souls) use hooks that look like this

Long bites and wide gapes. The problem with these competition hooks, in my opinion, is three-fold. First and foremost, they don’t tie flies that look good. I’m just an old fashioned guy. I’m not one of these advanced fly-fishers with their reels lined with monofilament, a canon ball sized bead head on the fly and a whole lot of shiny stuff all over it. The shape, balance, proportions of a fly matter to me. If they didn’t I’d tie a whole different set of patterns. Secondly, I do like a barb on the hook that I dutifully mash down before I ever tie a fly on it. I like it because that little bump stops my tippet from flying off when I tie it to the bend of the hook (and that rig has it’s place in one’s bag of tricks) and lastly because I can’t seem to get the right sort of hook wire proportion to hook type.

But the key to successfully hooking and holding fish is still gape and point of the hook. Wider gapes hook more successfully because the wide gape keeps the point free of the hook eye and materials you may have wrapped around the shank. The wider gape also gives a better bit into the fish as opposed to a ting hook gape that might just nip the skin because it just doesn’t have enough space to bite deeply. Big fish will just tear that sliver of skin. The variance in hook size to gape can be large. Here are a set of hooks that have a shank length that would tie a fly with a body length of about 6.5 mm (about a size 18 for a TMC 100). That’s about the size of a Paraleptophlebia Adoptiva (the early season Eastern Blue Quill) or a Beatis Vagans (the larger BWO).

Notice the huge difference in gape and point. Your ideal hook for this size of fly (or smaller) is somewhere in line with the bottom 4 hooks. Those are (from top to bottom) an Ahrex FW 502, a Partridge L5A, a TMC 102Y and a TMC 112TR. All amazing hooks for smaller sized dry flies down to the 3 mm fly sizes or so. The same thing applies to hooks for subsurface flies.

Once again you want a large gape. Here are four standard subsurface hooks in a size 14. These will all let you tie a nymph that is about 9 mm long

The bottom one looks much bigger because it has a much larger bite. The top three have a gape of about 4.5mm while the bottom one has a gape of a whopping 6.7mm. Plus a heavier wire, which aids in sinking. So all of these hooks provide acceptable platforms for tying nymphs and wet flies. But then some genius decided that you may need a larger nymph, and they came up with an absolutely brilliant way to get there. This is directly from their catalog.

An extended down-eye hook for wet flies and nymphs, the ABC1234 takes the same basic design as the ABC4567 and incorporates a 1X longer shank for tying more extended nymph patterns.   

Which basically means that to get a nymph with a 9 mm body all you change is drop the gape by 1 size and the wire diameter by 1 size! Make that make sense. And this insanity doesn’t end. You have this sort of thing

The size 18 in this hook has a length of 11 mm and a gape of 3mm, and all over this great land of ours, from sea to shining sea, fly shops sell people a whole butt load of #18 nymphs tied on this monstrosity. If you really like the shape take a pair of needle nosed pliers and bend the shank of the hook, or find a maker who makes one a little more forgiving (Though I haven’t found one).

There is only one place I’ve found for using long shank hooks and that is for certain types of dries. The longer shank allows you to get away with a slightly lighter wire that allows you to keep the tail end afloat. This Green Drake dun and associated spinner are examples. The same thing applies to flies like hoppers.

There is a section of the Mid-Atlantic states that resembles southern England around Hampshire and Wiltshire in that it is criss-crossed by spring fed streams. They call theirs’ chalkstreams, we call ours limestone spring creeks (and the geologists will dig out some difference beyond my ken). Theirs’ are tailored, and it costs 9 bazillion pounds to get a membership in some high faluting clubs. Ours are allowed to run wild and see nefarious types such as yours truly crawling around casting downstream to fish.

In these streams live two families of crustaceans the scuds and the isopods or sow bugs. The fish love eating them and a bunch of years ago I came up with a single fly that imitates them both. It was tied on a Partridge K4A hook, mostly in a size 16, with a few 18’s for good measure.

I used to churn them out by the bucket load because a lot got chewed up by the fish, a lot got left on the bottom of the stream and I have a fishing partner whose method of tying flies involves asking, “Where’s you box of XYX flies?” and then helping himself to a days worth at a time. But I’ve been fishing with him for more than 40 years so I must love the guy like a brother, so ……. However, when a fish took the fly it was inevitably hooked and rare was the fish you lost.

Anyway, came the day when I couldn’t buy anymore of those hooks. So I shifted to a Tiemco curved hook and now even though the fish would still eat the fly, the hookup rate dropped and so did the landing rate. That summer I was at the Orvis shop in Cherry Creek, Denver on our way up to the mountains. They had a pack of curved hooks under their own brand. Looking at them the bell suddenly went off. Like these Orvis curved hooks the Partridge K4A had an offset point. And there it was. The Tiemcos didn’t. The shape of these hooks is such that they seem designed to not hook fish.

The eye and front curve act almost like a weed guard. Offsetting that point makes all the difference. By dint and persuasion I tracked down the maker of the hooks Orvis was selling. These were the Daiichii 1130 hooks and they called the offset a reversed point

In the passing, Daiichii is a funny brand, all Japanese sounding but actually owned and operated by a guy in Tennessee. He also owns Angler’s Sport Group that distributes Daichii. Real nice guy and super helpful and full of info. They do make the nicest hooks around if you catch them on the right year. As Dave explained to me, they use contract manufacturers for their hooks in Korea and Japan. Some years they get good product, other years not so much. Their 15xx series subsurface hooks and 1170/1180 dry fly hooks and 1120 curved hooks are some of my new favorites. Too bad they stopped making the Alec Jackson Spey hook. That thing tied an awesome fly and hung onto big fish too.

Back to offset points.An offset, or reversed, point bends the point of the hook away from the shank. That allows the point to stay clear of the eye of the hook, It also stays a little turned away from the plane of the fly when a fish bites. All this increases the chances of and a better hook up. This is particularly so for small flies. Which is why Vince Marinaro’s Midge hook has an offset point. If you can’t find any, take your hemostats and slightly offset the point. It doesn’t have to be much, just a tad.

Just realized, no fish pictures so far. Let’s fix that. I mean, where’s the fun in reading a fish story with no fish to look at?

That’s my buddy and super guide Matt Murphy releasing a Watauga River brown that ate a small BWO.

The other type of hooks worth discussing are streamer hooks. I think the standard, extra long shanked streamer hook is responsible for more misses and lost fish than probably any other hook, including the ones with very small gapes. Consider the following scenario - you’re fishing a streamer, fish comes up and takes a bit fat swipe at your fly, you tighten up and the fish is on. The fish turns away from you and he’s gone. There is nothing you did that made the fly pop out. It just did. Now think of how many times that’s happened to you. Or the situation where the fish hits the fly hard, so hard you fell it all the way up your arm, and there is no hook up. Sound familiar? I don’t fish streamers very often, it being a lot more like work than I like, but this used to be a common scenario when I did. The reason for the first is that the long shank of the hook act as a lever arm against the bend of the hook. Especially since that long shank can rest against some part of the fish’s mouth. When the fish takes the fly the hook shank is most often pointing forward. As it turns away from you your line rotates that shank backwards. With a shorter shank hook that doesn’t cause much damage since the eye of the hook comes to rest against some part of the fish’s mouth or isn’t long enough to be able to pivot the hook.

With a long shank hook the action is very close to how bass fisherman unhook their fish. By pivoting the hook out. Watch. (It should cue to around 10:40)

I still don’t fish streamers very often but when I do it’s Dos Equis. No, got that confused with some other thing altogether. When I do fish streamers I use tubes or shanks, mostly tubes. Both for flies tied like traditional winged streamers

And flies tied in the round such as the ubiquitous Woolly Bugger

For those unfamiliar with the concept the fly is tied on a hollow plastic or metal tube. The leader is passed through the middle of the tube and tied to a short shank hook. There are a number of hooks either specifically designed for, or suitable for tube flies.

The short shank removes any pivoting and these hooks will hold tight. This fish took a brown, black and copper Wooly Bugger tied on a 1.5-inch copper tube. I was in mid thigh deep water with a deeper 25 foot run between me and the slower water on the far shore. The slower water region was another 20-30 ft wide. The fish put the fast water between itself and me and started diving for bottom. I had visions of leaders touching rocks and parting, of knots coming loose, and all sorts of other things. But I never feared my hook pulling loose. A battle ensued. I won!!!

Another, albeit much smaller tube fly eater. This little fellow was an honest 22-incher.

A word about hook sizes. You always hear flyfisherman tell others they caught the fish on a size yada yada doohickey. But very few of them specify what hook that fly was tied on. The same size can actually represent a whole range of hooks depending on shank ratio (1XL, 2Xl, 1XS etc), or hook type (those curved caddis hooks seem to be built to some other design parameters). They can also change from manufacturer to manufacturer. Somewhere along the way that concept got lost. You’ll catch a lot more fish if you compare hooks before selecting the size. Lastly, over the last 40-50 years there has been a general trend to use smaller and smaller flies for the same bug. And yet these folk somehow think the fish are more selective. I feel like yelling my head off sometimes - the fish aren’t more selective, y’all have lost any sense of proportion. I see shops advising their clients to use #16 Hendricksons! Really, guys? So get a real good measure of the bug you’re trying to imitate. I always carry a small plastic ruler with me. It’s a great little tool because you can get the actual size of fly you’re trying to imitate.

Once you do that you will notice that there is a huge discrepancy between the thing you’re fishing and what you think you’re imitating. Here are some examples.

Let’s start with the 800 lb gorilla. How many people think they’re fishing for Baetis Vagans and are fishing size 20 or smaller flies. Either they’re not fishing for Baetis Vagans, or they’re fishing the wrong size. Those BWOs are 16-18. We get great hatches of Baetis Vagans and Tricaudatus on the Colorado River in the fall. And that’s what we fish for them with #16-18 flies on Partridge L3A or Ahrex FW504 or #17 on a Tiemco 102Y. At the same time of year there is a much smaller BWO that comes off on some rivers called the Acentrella Turbida or its cousin the A. Insignificans These are much smaller and more importantly have a completely different egg laying behavior. But that’s a story for a different day. The issue I’m talking about is size. The common Baetis are much bigger bugs, and you’ll catch a lot more fish fishing the right size. The same thing holds for things like the Hendrickson (Ephemerella Subvaria). It’s a huge mayfly, typically suitable for size 10-12 tie on something like a Tiemco 100 or Daiichii 1170 or Gamakatsu S10. Not some paltry size 16 something some guy sold someone. There’s a world of info out there on actual species sizes. Try match the size, it’ll serve you well. Most people fish flies that are just too small.

So, in conclusion choose hooks with as large a gape as you can find, offset the point (if it isn’t already, especially on smaller hooks or hooks where the eye may interfere with the point of the hook, shy away from XL shank hooks where possible and don’t use streamer hooks, migrate to tubes and shanks.

Charles Cotton, in the Compleat Angler, talks about using two stallion tail hairs for fly leaders. I did some snooping around. Horse tail hair is, on the average, about .19mm and a tensile strength before it starts stretching of around 100 MPa (Yes people actually research this stuff, and in that study they found human hair is actually stronger though finer). That equates to about 0.0074” or about 3.5X and a strength of about 0.63lbs. So two of them are actually around a 3/0 tippet. Later on leaders started being made of silkworm gut. The standard silkworm gut was sold with a diameter of about 0.011.” It would then be drawn through a series of dies, each one reducing its diameter by 1 mil. So 1X material had been drawn 1 time through a die and had a diameter of 0.01 inches, 2X was reduced by 2 mil and became 0.009 and so on. That concept has held. In terms of actual impact on properties of leaders that method leads to all sorts of confusion, but more of that later. Silkworm gut came in a variety of colors, but it was mostly an opaque color ranging from a sort of ivory/beige to grays and browns.

When I was a young lad, we would spend the summers up in the mountains in an area where every little trickle held trout. My Grandfather owned a cabin up there and the various and sundry aunts, uncles and cousins would cycle through, but we spent the summer. My first fly rod was a Shakespeare Wonder Rod that was this white thing I guess somewhere around 7 ft long. My Dad had tied about 20 feet of fly line to the end reel seat (I had no reel) and a length of some sort of tippet was hung to the end. My Dad used to smoke a pipe and I carried a spool of tippet material and a bunch of flies and some shot in an old tobacco can. I think that tippet material was probably 4X or so.

I bring all this up to point out that until very recently everyone caught trout without much regard to tippet color and used, what today would be considered, rope. And they got away with it because I think the basic mechanisms of trout feeding preclude much by way of tippet shyness. I have a couple of past articles on trout vision, one that has to do with surface visibility and the other with general visual acuity. I’m presenting them again as reference material.

Dry Fly Leaders

The basic gist of the two of them combined is that trout have limited vision of rather low quality. When looking up at the surface a trout has a field of view that is 1.13x the trout’s depth below the surface. So a fish lying 2 feet below the surface only sees about 2ft 3 inches out from where it’s lying. If you were to cast a dry fly in line with this trout, any part of your tippet more than about 3 feet away is just not visible to the fish. It just isn’t. So people fishing 4, 5 and 6 ft tippets to keep their leaders away from tippet shy fish are just fooling themselves.

The visual acuity of a trout’s eye is about 1/14th that of a human’s with 20/20 vision. So however well you can see the tippet at 28 feet with your eyes corrected to 20/20 is what the trout sees at 2 feet. And if they can see the tippet they sure can see the hook hanging below the fly and the eye of the hook it’s tied to.

So is there a reason for a longer and lighter tippet? Yes there is, but visibility isn’t the reason. For surface fishing longer and lighter tippets allow you to throw some slack into the tippet, forestalling drag. If you can’t figure out how to do it yourself, rely on an even longer tippet not allowing the leader to straighten out and so throwing slack in there. This is the same story as slow fly rods, trying to use incorrect tackle characteristics to make up for lack of skill. Learn how to do it right and you will catch a lot more fish. I think you always find the long leader crowd is also the non-catching crowd, because while the long leader may drop in the slack it takes away from accurate casting and efficient hook setting. I know this is an article on tippet materials and leaders but I’ll take a side trip on a couple of casting hints. There are 3 basic ways to thrown slack into cast with a dry fly. If you can do it cast angling your cast upwards a bit and let it slide backwards as it settles to the water.

The second way is to wiggle the rod a bit and through some slack into the leader. Once cast, unless you move it off track the fly is going to where you sent it. If, however, you cast a little high you can wiggle the rod tip and throw some slack into the tippet as the fly descends to the water. Of course this is tricky whe it’s windy so go with the technique shown above, or the last one I’ll show below.

The last technique actually involves manipulating the fly and leader on the water and requires fishing downstream to the fish. Cast your fly a little bit above the trout’s picture window. You can also move it to the side if you like. Now gently lift your rod tip an drag the fly towards yourself. Then drop the rod tip depositing the line and leader in a series of slack curves and let them slide down to the fish.

As you go along you’ll develop your own tricks for throwing slack into the leader under all sorts of conditions. A long leader is never the right answer. In fact an overly long leader is always the wrong answer.

So my tippet section to my first dry fly (yes I often fish two dry flies on my leader) is invariably 3 ft or less and the section between the first and second flies can vary between 1 and 2 feet depending on how I want to fish them.

Let’s talk a bit about tippet size for dry flies. As I got a better grip on what I was doing and graduated up from the tobacco can, the rule of thumb I was taught was to divide the size of the fly into 4 and that was the tippet size to use. So a size 12-14 would be 3X, 16-18 would be 4X and so on. Somewhere along the way I decided that for dries a divide into 3 made more sense. 10-12 to 4X, 14-16 to 5X, 18-20 to 6x and so on, but there never really was a reason to go below 6X unless we were way down into the size 24 type flies. The only thing finer tippet material buys you is more headaches, less control and general pains in the hind quarters. Learn to cast some slack into your leader and the rest will go away. The same thing applies to leader length. I’m not sure what extra leader length buys you. Obviously small streams mandate short leaders. You need fly line for control, so streams like these are best fished with leaders between 6 and 7.5 ft.

The key to getting a leader that turns over nicely is matching the butt section of the leader to the tip of your fly line. Then you need a gentle taper down to the level tippet. In no way am I suggesting you tie your own leaders. God knows life is too short for that sort of rigor when perfectly good leaders are available commercially. But do pay attention to the butt sections of your leaders. When they’re short, as in fishing these small streams, you run into an issue with the butt sections often being too heavy, or the taper too sharp. If you’re fishing a heavier line weight like a 5 there probably is no good solution. A 4 is a little better and a 3 even better so. Now buy yourself a 7.5 ft leader for a light tippet, say 5-6X.

Now you can trim off the front level tippet section and tie on your tippet. If you are fishing a heavier line and can’t find a suitably thick butt section tie on a level piece of monofilament and then the leader. Some people reading this piece may notice the mention of the butt section diameter on the leader specifications for the first time. I believe it’s as important as the tip section. Every once in a while Orvis, where the above chart is from, does get it right. So do others. I wouldn’t buy a leader from a company that didn’t think it was worth mentioning the size of the butt section. It would seem they don’t know their butt sections from a hole in the ground. Once you have the leader matched at the butt you can trim the tippet off until you’r back to a thickness where you can tie your own tippet on. I find that a 1 size skip works fine. So if you want a 5X tippet you’re okay if you trim the leader back to where it is 3 or 4X thick. More than that and it will tend to hinge. None of this is exact. You don’t need to carry micrometers and tippet gauges and all that sort of stuff. If you must, feel a piece of the appropriate thickness on your spool, or just go by touch. If the leader hinges, address the situation. If not keep on keeping on.

Larger rivers mandate slightly heavier lines. So make an appropriate adjustments. You’re not likely to fish this river with a 3 wt. A hefty 4wt might be fine, but when the mountain winds start blowing a 5 or sometimes even a 6wt would be better.

Now, of course you need a heavier butt section, and the taper down to 4 or 5X would need to be longer mandating a 9 or possibly even a 10 ft leader. None of that has anything to do with catching fish - they can’t see your leader. It all has to do with the ability to manage presentation of your fly.

A gratuitous trout picture, since it’s good to look at pretty fish from time to time, then we’ll move on to leaders for nymphing.

Nymphing Leaders

Things change once we’re looking at nymphing leaders. The first thing that governs the length of the leader is how far down you need to get your fly.

The South Holston is hydroelectric tailwater with a peculiar topography and hence hydrology. The river bed strecthes from shore to shore without much of a shelf. All that happens when the turbines start blowing is that the water level rises, several feet, and starts moving a lot faster. At low flows this section of river is probably flowing at 100 cfs

But there are pools and potholes ranging from 2 to 6 feet deep. When the flow rises to 2,000 cfs or more the water may rise a couple of feet across the entire river and the flow kicks up a lot.

But since the fish don’t have shelves to climb up onto, they stay hunkered in the deep pools and potholes. But now those have depths of 5-10 ft with a rollicking current. The insect life on the South Holston is almost dormant at low water. The high water though kicks everything to life and the nymphs start drifting prior to the daily hatch of yellow or olive mayflies that runs almost year around. In the grass beds the scuds get active and some inevitably get kicked loose into the current. The fish also start feeding. But, until the fish start rising, this is the world of deep water nymphing. No 7-10 ft leader is going to cut it here. The locals fish a thing they call the bottom bounce rig. A more Godforsaken thing pretending to be fly fishing is hard to find. I tend to use what I call a maggot rig (look at the link below to get a description of one).

But, of course, now given that we need to reach down 6-10 ft, the leader must perforce be longer than the dry fly one. But one special criterion kicks in. You have to sink the whole bloody mess and keep it drifting at the speed of the bottom whicle the top tries to swing right on by. In order to do so, you need the sinking part of the leader to offer as little water resistance as possible. Water drag is the force with which the water drags on a body. This is mostly a matter of the shape of the body. Yes, different surface finishes can change the amount of drag, but in the case of fishing line, it’s just the thickness of the line. But it’s like the square of the thickness. That means that if you were to compare the drag on 4X tippet to a 5X tippet, the drag on the 5X would be 27% lower than the 4X tippet. That’s a meaningful amount. So the finest tippet material you can get away with, the better off you are while nymphing. All you have to watch out for is that the finer you make it the harder it becomes for you to cast a really long line. Though sometimes you don’t have much of a choice. It may be hard to tell in this picture because of the clarity but that fish was sitting in about 8ft of water.

In a spot where the current actually moves right on along.

I normally hope the fish are rising there, because I hate throwing the 10 to 11 feet of tippet required to nymph it. Fortunately the “maggot rig” makes it at least halfway bearable.

Leaders meant for nymphing deeper and/or faster water require a bit of design and also a change in casting style. you need the fly to sink down to where the fish are. That’s either a long way (deep) or the surface moved the rest of you leader along fast as the fly tries to sink. The easiest way to let this happen is to make a few stack mends starting as soon as the fly touches the water and starts sinking. Stack mends allow you to keep the rest of your terminal gear at about the same location as the fly sinks. Here’s a video about it.

There are a few tricks to the technique that have to do with your leader. If your butt section is too short and heavy, you are liable to pull the indicator up and lift the tippet, which doesn’t help. If you don’t fish an indicator, and I sometimes don’t because it isn’t the best you don’t have a natural anchor. In either case the leader section before the tippet must bleed off enough energy to not lift your leader when you stack mend. You could end up with an extremely long leader depending on how deep you’re fishing.

I do a lot of fishing from a drift boat. Next to fishing dry flies, one of my favorite ways to fish is nymphing fast moving flats that are full of potholes. You can find that sort of water on most of my favorite trout rivers.

The Roaring Fork

Or this beauty in Eastern Tennessee, the Watauga

These sections of river look relatively featureless but under the water they are a hive of troughs and potholes and divots ranging from wash basin size to many yards long. You can fish them with nymphs the same way you would fish them with a dry fly. Drop your fly in a likely looking spot and keep it drifting potshoting every little underwater feature. But what you need to do is drop your fly into that extra depth of each little feature. the way I do it is cast downstream and a little across and let the flies drift towards a target, as the approach the target you give it a gentle stack mend or two and voila, your fly sinks don into the target. once your about to get out of the hole lift the rod tip and lift the fly off the rim of the hole, then let it drift along to the next one, or ock up and cast to the next one, rinse, repeat. You can’t really play this game with a strike indicator, they keep yu from sinking your fly at the right moment. So you need a nymph leader you can actually cast, and mend, and stack mend. I build this leader very much like I build a dry dropper leader. Tie the upper section like a dry fly leader though with a slightly stouter end. My nymph leaders end in 3X and my dry dropper leaders in 3or 4X depending on the size of the dry. Now drop your nymphs down on 5X tippet. A couple, or three beahd head flies will get down in a hurry.

The key to casting all nymph leaders is to open your loop, up slightly. That will drop the lower part of the loop and the rod tip below the business end of the leader.

Tippet Material

Tippet material comes in a plethora of brands most of which are branded with some sort of superlative - Absolute, Super, Power, etc. It’s also an area in which manufacturers lie and cheat like there was no tomorrow. Many a brand’s 5X has an advertised strength of everyone else’s 4X but an unadvertised thickness of everyone else’s 3X. Even batches from the same vendor show massive amounts of variability. I always buy my tippet material at the local fly shop (in fact I try and buy everything at the local fly shop. Having run one, I can relate to these folk trying to make a living in a very tough environment.) That let’s me feel the material and get to what I want. The minor differences in breaking strength are immaterial. Ever tried to break 5X tippet when the fly was 10 feet up in a tree? See? A normal trout gets to be 5 lbs at about 24”. Not many people have caught a 5 lb trout. The strength the fish can pull is much less. The breaking strength of your tippet isn’t the problem.

The issue with tippet material breaking either has to do with it’s condition or the knot. There’s all sorts of stuff written about how to tie your knot. I’m not going to add to the pile. If you haven’t gotten there yet, well……….. The second big issue is material deterioration due to heat. It doesn’t take a lot. Especially some of the new materials where they build up strength by impregnating the material with some sort of resin. Heat makes the impregnating material leach out and the tippet material loses strength and integrity. One surefire indication is when your material starts pig tailing on you. The mere act of tying the knot puts all sorts of curly cues into it. If you catch a fish, the pull on the material makes it twist and turn once the pressure is removed. That material is now shot. Summer heat makes that happen rather rapidly. If fishing on a boat, throw your spools into the guides cooler. If wade fishing put them somewhere cooler. I normally have mine on a long lanyard and tuck the business end into a vest pocket that also has a frozen bottle of water. Two birds, one stone.

Now, very briefly, let’s touch on the great flourocarbon argument. This supposed invisible, unbreakable, sinking wonder that costs 3 times what anything else does.

There was a reason I started this article with pictures of leaders in various shades of ivory, gray and brown with nary an invisible one in sight. At certain times of the year I like swinging tube flies for fish, whether they be anadromous fish, or bigger browns in big or small water. Sometimes I do it with single handed rods and sometime I do it with two handed rods. But in all cases I fish some sort of sinking tip to get, and keep, the fly down as it swings. This means a short leader leading to a dark brown, grey or black sinking head.

There’s about 2 ft between the MOW Tip and first fly (look for the loop attaching the leader to the sinking tip). The fish don’t care. This guy didn’t on a similar rig

Nor did this guy

Not only did they not care about the great big slug of dark colored sinking tip sitting two feet away from the fly, but their buddies didn’t care about the hook hanging below the fly, or the knot in the eye of the hook, in each and every instance in which they ate a fly. They don’t care because they don’t have the eye sight that allows them to care.

But let’s go ahead and look at this visibility argument. Visibility under water is due to a combination of factors. The first, as anywhere else is the ability of an article, any article to reflect light. That’s how you see color. So if a material reflects light it becomes visible. However these materials become difficult to see if the light they reflect is the same as their surroundings. That’s essentially camouflage. So one claim you’ll see made is that flourocarbon is less reflective. Baloney

There’re 3 brands of tippet material of the same professed thickness. One is a flourocarbon. You tell me.

And now you can see which one is the flourocarbon. The next issue is contrast against the surroundings. There is an outline contrast, defined by the reflection, that’s the same for both types of material. There’s a coloration contrast and that’s about the same. The last is this stuff about the refractive index. The claim is that the flourocarbon has a value closer to water so refraction won’t be as big an issue. But what water, with what sediments and chemical content?. It all changes the refractive index. More importantly water with sediment or other dissolved components like chalk or silt, would make the refractive index moot. But my biggest argument is that from time immemorial, trout haven’t cared. They still don’t.

Alright, let’s move on to the next argument, flourocarbon is denser so sinks faster. Okay, maybe technically it does, but does it really matter? It has a relative density of around 1.7-1.8. So let’s call it 1.75. Now consider a 5X tippet 1m long. That would have a mass of 0.12 gms for flourocarbon, versus 0.1 gms for nylon monofilament. A single number 8 shot would more than make up the difference, and you don’t have to put up with the poor knotting, high cost or low durability of flourocarbon. And if sink rates really were to drag the fly down, you’d have to carry an entirely different set of leaders and tippet material for fishing dries. Of course that wouldn’t apply to the Euro-nymphing crowd who seem to either be happy not fishing dries or have to carry two rods. I just don’t see the point in spending the money for flourocrabon. If I had to spend 3X the money, I’d buy three times as many spools, changing them out every so often.

Like most other things in fly fishing leaders are as easy or complicated as you want them to be. I don’t like complex, so I buy standard tapered leaders, they work fine, I keep my leaders as short as I can get away with, I use the heaviest tippet material I can get away with, and over the years I have learned how to actually do what needs doing, as opposed to trying to overcome the issue with funky tackle. The straight forward way will catch you a lot more fish, with a lot less pain in the tuchus.

And a July Watauga trout. They do grow them pretty down there.

Forty Eight years ago, today I was somewhere under the red arrow, taken, by a friend, to a show by some band called The Grateful Dead. Here’s how it all started

It’s been the better part of a lifetime since that day. That morning I wouldn’t have said something drastic was going to happen on that April day. But in one fell swoop the universe around me changed. They often say

So I’m not going to try. I’ll just speak for a bit. Some of you will get it. Some will wonder, and it may be some will have their interest piqued just enough to go see.

There are things that become so entwined with all you are and do that they become a part of the fabric of your being.

When our son was a few months old he was having one of those days that all babies have and all parents know - the one where they just won’t stop crying and fussing. It was my turn and I was walking him up and down the upstairs hallway trying to see if I could calm him down. I walked into my study and ther Dead were playing and Jerry was singing something or the other. The boy stopped crying - immediately. I walked out of the room, and he crying started again. I went back in, and he stopped again. So we just sat there and listened to Jerry songs until the kid fell asleep. My wife found the Teddy Bear’s Picnic book at Border’s. It had a looping cassette that we wore out in short order.

As a young teenager, in line at a Furthur show, I heard him tell this woman that he didn’t have a choice in the matter, he had been imprinted.

The music is there. It’s great, the fine product of a bunch of phenomenal musicians. But it’s a lot more than that. It’s being accepting of others. Naked pole guy was doing his thing. No one bothered him, and he bothered no one.

It’s the understanding that sometimes someone needs an extra minute or two, so hang around for them. It’s knowing that what goes around comes around, do something for someone today, and someone will pay it forward. It comes in understanding that everyone needs a miracle once in a while. Make that miracle happen for someone and it will come back to you. It’s seeing that there really is no time to hate. That a kind word brings joy to the listener and there is an immense amount of joy in return.

Somewhere part of the way through the first set they hit us with this - sweetness incarnate.

Somewhere later we came to Lazy Lightning and Supplication. Musically it was all over but the shouting.

Many worlds have I come since that day forty eight years ago. The music has been there, but the experience has rounded the edges a bit, mellowed the spirit, taught me how to listen to the river sing, softened the world around me, and me in the the world around myself.

And for that I am truly Grateful.

The Romans had a God for everything, including one for the household and one for the pantry, Lares and Penates. Amongst all other things enjoyed by the swanky Roman Gods these two had the honor of a special sacrificial food - Libum, some say the originator of the cheesecake. This thing was about equal parts cheese and flour. Then along came the Savillum, shown below that leaned a bit more heavily into the cheese. It was sweetened with honey and often flavored with bay leaves (something I think I’m going to try with my next cheesecake).

Time went on and people made all sorts of cheesecakes, baked, cold setting, made with this cheese or the other and flavored in a gazillion ways. Then somewhere along the way, about a million years after Cato the Elder included a recipe for Libum in one of his books the cheesecake arrived in the kitchen of a small restaurant called La Vina in San Sebastian Spain. Here in the hands of one Santi Rivera the son of the couple who founded the restaurant it went through a metamorphosis. It was 1980, things were starting to become somewhat available in Spain and Santi started making cheesecake every so often. But he kind of messed around with a bit, as is the wont of any self respecting baker. I mean, the other guys have already done what’s in the recipe, where’s the fun in following that. So Santi got rid of the base or crust, and a whole lot of the various flavorings and stuff, and made it a little creamier, and a little sweeter and then, for some reason, burned the heck out of it. And it tasted great!!

Then the fame of Santi’s burnt cheesecake started spreading. It went North, and south and east and everywhere else. Eventually it ended up with your’s truly, rather late in the game. But why not, I’m game for another cheesecake recipe.

I tried the basic recipe and it was good, but it didn’t have the zing I wanted. The second time around I brule’ed the top. I figured if it’s supposed to have caramel, let’s give it caramel. But the caramel starts flowing when it melts on the uneven surface and gets sort of messy.

Someone suggested I use a blowtorch instead of trying to brulee it under the grill. I won’t do that. The next time I tried it there was some lemon curd sitting around. (I know, just sitting around). So, of course it went into the cheesecake, and now against all the laws of nature and Santi we had added flavor to a basque cheeseckae. But it sort of worked. In fact my wife said it was the best cheesecake she’d ever had.

So along comes Easter. I get to bake dessert. The wife says make that lemon cheesecake you made. So I made a few.

And now I think I have it - the perfect Lemon Basque Cheesecake recipe. I made these on a semi-industrial scale but I’ll just cut the recipe down to size. First sit yourself down with a zester and zest up a passel full of lemons. Then we can get down to business.

Okay, I tried their cute little recipe template. It’s so slow it’d drive a snail nuts. So here goes.

Lemon Basque Cheesecake

Ingredients
3 Meyer Lemons
3 Regular Lemons (they add a little more zing to the Myers)
1 kg full fat cream cheese
225 gms Mascarpone 
450 ml heavy cream
5 eggs (the size they now sell as large in the US)
2 extra egg yolks
350 gms sugar
1/4 tsp salt
30 gms of all purpose flour
Parchment paper - enough for 3-4 layers in a 9-10-inch springform pan

Method

1. Get all the ingredients to room  temperature and start your oven preheating to 220C/ ~425 to 430 F
2. Zest all the lemons. I always use a cheese grater (See picture above) It works grate. :)
3. Juice all the lemons and mix the juice with the zest and put aside.
4. Cream the cheese and sugar until smooth using the paddle attachment on your stand mixer, or any other thing you can find to beat the living daylights out of this, I don't think it matters.
5. Once it's smooth add in the zest and lemon juice. This will tend to make the mixture congeal a bit but beat it back into submission.
6. Keep beating this thing while drizzling in the heavy cream. I found it gets better if the mixture is a little airy at this stage.
7. Beat all the eggs together in a bowl along with the salt.
8. Sift the flour into the mixture and mix in.
9. Add the eggs in about one egg at a time, constantly beating the mixture.
10. Somewhere along the way line your springform tin with parchment paper. You want 3-4 layers at about 45 degrees to each other with enough sticking out on all sides. There is no crust to this cheesecake. The parchment is all you have. And the cake will rise while cooking only to thoroughly collapse later.
11. Pour the cheesecake mixture into the springform pan and bung it into the oven.
12. Leave it the heck alone for about 30-35 minutes depending on your oven. Everyone's heats and cooks differently. Mine is slower and so I leave it in there for 35 minutes.
13. Now open the oven and shake the tin. The cake should have puffed up and rise a bit. There might even be a crack around the circumference. When tapped the center should jiggle. Not a big sloshing around thing. More like this.

And the top should be nicely caramelized. If it isn't or the jiggle is too loose, let it be in there for another 2-3 minutes and try again. 
14. When ready, take it out and let cool completely. You don't have to cool this like a regular cheesecake. The caramelized top  holds it from splitting apart. The cake will sink in on itself. (see pictures below).
15. Refrigerate once cooled, but yank it out of the fridge for a mite before serving. You want it closer to room temperature than fridge temperature. It tastes and feels better.

The resulting cake is a a little firm around the edges, but soft, smooth, creamy and so good in the middle. Serve this sucker right off the parchment paper. Anything else and it’ll all fall apart on you. Run a sharp knife under hot water to cut with.

Enjoy.

We left Mom with my aunt and uncle in St Albans, took the train down to London and left our bags at King’s Cross station. then it was off to Hardy’s for some last minute stuff and my first ever two-handed salmon rod. I was sixteen that year and my father was taking me up to a river about as way up North as you can get in Scotland - the Thurso. A river that flows through a treeless flat land beyond the Scottish Highlands.

We took the night sleeper to Inverness and then drove up along the coast before cutting across to Thurso. We eventually left the highlands behind. The land was flat here, with the occasional copse of trees and the breeze blew steadily. Somewhere, along the way we took a small detour to look at the river. It seemed unprepossessing, yet had a magnetism as the crystal clear water moved from pool to pool, a funneling run at the head and a fan out at the tail.

The next week was wonderful. I learned how to cast a two-handed rod, I caught my first few Atlantic Salmon and fell in love with fishing for them. The Thurso wasn’t a big river, not like the mighty Spey, or even the Miramichi. It didn’t have fish the likes of the big Norwegian rivers, but back then in the 70s it gave them up readily.

There is something about the structure of good salmon and steelhead rivers that makes them ideally suited to a down and across style of fishing. The best water to catch them in, and the type that marks the best rivers is a ling steadily flowing pool. A salmon or steelhead pool isn’t like a trout river pool. We’d call it a run or a glide.

It would be hard to fish this with a nymph or even a dry (though I do love fishing dries for Atlantic Salmon and Steelhead). But the fish oblige by chasing swinging flies and you can pick a pool like this apart with a big two handed rod and a swung fly. When you get the hang of it, those big rods will fling a fly right across a river like this with seemingly little effort. There’s a nice slot between those first two evergeens on river left and I’ve actually thrown flies into the darned trees casting from slightly up and across on the right bank. I may not know everything about catching fish, but not many a tree can get past me. Here’s my buddy Rick Smith making it look easy.

And here he is with the just rewards

Pools with a steep bank behind and a steep drop off in front you that doesn’t let you wade can be dissected using a Spey rod.

Silver sided salar, the leaper, will make light of those thunder heads

The Atlantic Salmon is a worthy fighter, but it does so by the Marquis of Queensbury’s rules. A civilized beast, who will give you just what is needed, not one ounce more. His cousin from the other ocean is a street brawler. Even when you have him by the tail, he’s still raring to go.

Way down river, where they first come in these fellows, even when small, attack with a vengeance. You dared to stick them with hook. Now you’re going to pay for it. And they’re beautiful, steel grey tops, shiny silver sides with just a shade of pink like the first tinge of a setting sun. When hooked they dash around, leaping and cavorting with burst of dynamic energy. At least the little half pounders do.

Hold your rod up, give them a little line, and they’ll beat themselves into submission. But their bigger relatives are an entirely different story. It’s like the difference between a bantam and heavy weight fight. Their first instinct is head back down to the mouth of the river, greyhounding across the surface with mighty bounds, whirling and twirling and leaping like some beserking dervish. The rod thumps, the line is taut and the reel screeches, you’re mind is desperately willing them to stop. And mostly they don’t. Every once in a while you do bring that 40-incher to the net.

The Atlantic Salmon gives you more dressage. A couple of gentle jumps, some prancing and preening, a few runs and then in for a nice cup of tea. Except for the ones on rivers like the Gaula - they want to tear you a new you know what.

Don’t get me wrong, they’re still mighty fish to catch.

Screeching reels brings to mind a story. When Prince Charles was getting married Hardy asked what he wanted as a gift. He asked for a pair of 1912 Perfect Salmon reels. Apparently he thought they had the perfect sounding ratchet. I don’t know old Chuck at all, but if he can discern the the sound of a Perfect by the model year, then there’s a little bit of alright in him somewhere.

I’m a fly tyer. That’s what I do for fun, and when it’s over

"I'd sooner be on my way,
Up to some paradise, 
where the trout streams flow 
and the air is nice"
                                       - Bob Dylan

And these flies are so much fun, colorful, scintillating, layering colors and textures. When I was a young man I would tie fully dressed salmon flies, which my father would tear apart with a bodkin on the river because they fished better that way. But it’s a whole lot simpler now. However the charm and color remains. Like all things with him, those meant for the Atlantic Salmon’s are gentile.

Those for his rowdy relative from the wrong side of the tracks more reminiscent of Kramer’s technicolor dream pimp coat.

But I tie them all, some say to obsessive levels, but then “too much of everything is just enough”

So give me a nice pool

A trusty rod and a reel with a good ratchet

A nice colorful fly with some action

and a cooperative silver fish

and I won’t ask for much more.

Not much talked about is the mountain feature known as the Eastern Continental Divide. Rivers rising west of the divide flow westwards into the Gulf of Mexico. One such river is this little gem rising up in the mountains of Western North Carolina and making its way down through Eastern Tennessee. Along the way it flows in and out of a couple of big reservoirs emerging from the second as a prime trout fishery that boasts a plentiful population of wild brown and rainbow trout. Once the river leaves the environs of the second dam it becomes a sort of woodland river with one passage through a town. Under lower water conditions it flows lazily through heavily wooded deciduous slopes of rolling, old world mountains.

Along with it’s chunky wild trout

the river is also home of one of the finest guides in the fly fishing business, my buddy Matt Murphy, once of Island Park, Idaho, now plying his skills in Eastern Tennessee. The river is home to a great hatch of the staid super-hatch producer, the Brachycentrus Americanus known variously as the Granom, the Big Granom, the Mother’s Day Caddis, or whatever else people call it.

Down a mite from the dams, the river picks up nutrients and the macroinvertebrate population becomes to diversify and the diptera and olives are augmented by other things, including the world’s supply of Brachycentrus. For a two week period, sometime in April they come out by the million

This was at the boat ramp on April 15, 2024. It just got crazier from there. And the fish came out to play. The lower reaches of this river hold a lot of wild rainbows that always seem to come out for the Grannoms.

The term Grannom typically applies to some species of Brachycentrus, an organic case building caddis. They range from the large Brachycentrus Americanus that is probably a size 10-12 depending on the hook you use to small species that can be tied on #16 or even #18 hooks. In some way of another the term Grannom gets attached to lot of these species, even though they differ drastically in appearance. There are a pair of species that hatch on the Delaware River system, particularly on the West Branch in late April or early May. One, the Brachycentrus appalachia hatches with a bright apple green body and an almost white wing that turns darker with time and the other has a charcoal body and a brown wing

All the various and sundry Grannoms share certain behavioral charecteristics that make them available to the fish throughout the year in their different metamorphic stages. The cased larva migrate around in the riffles in order to find new feeding spots as they wipe their little domain clear of food. This occurs at all times of the year, and often, in the fall, as the waters drop to abysmally low levels, these caddis larva become the most readily available food. Even tiny little streams like this produce great sport on a cased larva imitation.

As do larger streams like the Roaring Fork that produced these specimens mixed up with a bunch of Green Drake nymphs.

There is a trick to fishing these rappelling larva that Gary LaFontaine talks about in his book. I’ll let you folk read the book to find out, but I will tell you it probably increases the success rate 5-10X.

I tie a simple pattern with a bunch of twisted (sometimes mixed natural and olive) pheasant tail fibers as the case and a simple bit of dubbing and some hackle. I will sometimes add a bead head but I normally like fishing an unweighted fly with a split shot placed about 8-12 inches above the fly.

In the spring the cased larva migrate out of the riffles into the slower waters of the pools, where they will pupate and hatch. The heads of big pools like this will see the rocks covered with cased larva.

Cased caddis larva patterns are dynamite when that migration is going on.

Once the larva migrate to the heads of the large pools they pupate, and there may occasionally be a lapse in fishing Brachycentrus patterns. But this is merely the calm before the storm. Very soon the caddis will hatch. And in most cases they do so in very large numbers. But again, as with most things Brachycentrus related, here is a secret to success in fishing to trout feeding on them.

Gary LaFonatine was an inveterate observer of stream life, often from within the environs of the stream. He writes of how the hatching pupa of Brachycentrus species would drift for hundreds of feet before rising to the surface and hatching. They would be bouyed along in a bubble of gas. LaFontaine’s sparkle pupa can be a killer pattern for trout feeding below the surface before the hatch gets heavy enough to drag them to the surface. Even in the early stages of the hatch a pupal pattern often works wonders on rising fish.

Top: LaFontaine deep sparkle pupa with a bead head. Bottom a variant of the LaFontaine surface sparkle pupa. As with all things fly tying, sparse antron bubbles work better.

Almost all Brachycentrus species hatch in very large numbers sometime from mid morning to early afternoon. The ride lazily down the stream for many feet before taking wing and one can often count down to their getting eaten. Most hatches I’ve encountered occur in the slower waters of pools making the fish and fishing easier paced.

Typical of the fish in that pod slurping down Grannoms

For the sake of brevity I’m just going to link an older post that talks about dry fly patterns you can use for this hatch.

The Brachycentrus species lay there eggs while sitting on the surface, often with a lot of twisting, tur

ning, skittering and general all round commotion. The egg laying activity timing wanders all over the map. On the Eagle River in Colorado we see egg laying often at the same time as the hatch, making a skittered caddis a killer on that river. On other rivers the egg laying is an evening phenomenon. These are a mixed bag of E Invaria spinners and Brachycentrus Appalachia bee bopping around on a riffle at the head of the pool at about 7pm on April 24. A short while later they segregated, the spinners sticking around over the riffle to do the dirty boogie for the one and final time, while the caddis beat feet either to the pool above or below.

Pretty soon, nice chunky fish were rising up like birds. Here’s Frank with a specimen.

They are short lived hatches, two weeks being an average span. Some rivers might see more than one species, though they do tend to overlap. They can often clash with the first of the cyclic eastern mayfly hatches such as the Epheremerella Subvaria or Invaria (The Hendrickson of early Sulphur) who carry the glamor. But the Grannom hatch can be a fun hatch to fish - if you can find it and find an incongested stream on which to fish.

But it’s a fun hatch. It should be starting on your local streams sometime within the next few weeks. And the fishing can be very good too.

This is the thunderous Grateful Dead Rhythm section bringing the band into The Other One. The drummers lay out the beat. The bass player takes them into the melody - that is the difference.

Most places the drummer and the bass player would lay out the beat and tempo, the rhythm guitarist would pull the lead into the melody. And there you have it - the makings of the Grateful Dead guitar trio.

Story has it that Phil, then a trumpet and violin player met Garcia while he was a recording engineer at KPFA (a radio station all Dead Heads should check out). Garcia apparently asked him to a Warlocks show and then talked him into playing bass for them. Got him a bass guitar, showed him the bass scales and Phil took it from there. I gather he went off to the woodshed for a week or two and then started playing with the Warlocks and then the Grateful Dead. That novel introduction to the instrument coupled with his musical knowledge led to all that was to come.

In every Deadhead’s life there is an epiphany. A stark moment of the profound realization that we are looking at, listening to and living something unique. This stuff doesn’t creep up on you - I don’t believe it does. It smacks you across the forehead like you’ve been hit with a two by four. 4/12/1978, I was an engineering undergrad in Durham, NC. Some band was playing in Cameron. A roommate had a spare ticket and convinced me to go.

I am somewhere around that arrow, 10 rows back on Jerry’s side. Then the show began. I was trying to get a grasp of what exactly was going on here, and then they got to the 4th song in the set - Peggy-O. I’ve talked about this from my point of view of Bobby. But there were three guitarists on stage. I was into prog rock and jazz and folk and such where the bass player mainly kept time. there would be an occasional bass solo in the jazz world, but it really was pushing an issue. Always felt, and still feels like the band being polite and letting the poor relative have an occasional good cut of meat.

We’ve always heard the term “bass guitar.” Bill Graham used it introducing Phil, “On bass guitar - Mr. Phil Lesh.” Peggy-O came on. I got over the fact that here was this American “rock” band playing a Scottish folk tune. I got over the second guitarist’s mastery, and then the thing started grabbing onto me. There was something going on here.

... your guineas are too few,
I fear my Mama would be angry-O

Bobby brings Jerry to the end of that verse and the listen to Phil lead Jerry into the next.

What would your Mama think?
What would your Mama think, if she heard my guineas clink.......

And then he took Jerry right into the first solo, and that solo was supported by that thing that Phil did. I think they call it contrapuntal or something, but anyhow, almost 48 years later I still ask the same question I asked Dave when Peggy-O came to and end, “What the fuck was that?!!” To his credit his answer was merely, “You’re welcome.” Later in that set we got hit by a stellar “Lazy Lightning>Supplication” Listen to the 3 guitarists take you from Lazy Lightning and on through Supplication. When those 3 got going nothing came close.

The breadth and depth of musical area covered by Phil was remarkable. Popular 20th century music seems to be constructed in layers, and it seems players are expected to keep to their layers. Occasionally you can come across situations where multiple players may enter into a single layer, but that’s mainly through swapping parts - John/George, Duane/Dickey, Warren/Derek or even Miles/Trane. But Phil didn’t do that. He occupied all the lanes, just keeping to the lower octaves.

Sometimes you just have to go to the mountain for the big ones.

Or the very next evening.

I mean, this is how they started the show, and just listen to Phil bouncing around the lower areas, setting the harmony, the beat, the tempo, everything. Weaving in and out, through, and around Garcia’s lead and Bobby’s (well whatever the heck it is Bobby did) like the makings of a complex Jacquard tapestry.

2/19/1971 - the band had just lost their 2nd drummer/percussionist. Listen to their guitarists, especially the guy managing the lower end step right in and fill the vacuum.

When I first heard about this Phil and Bobby duo thing, I wondered how that would turn out. I was supposed to go see the Radio City Music Hall shows with our son, but couldn’t because of something or the other. The kid did (more about him in just a bit). He called me after the show - “Dad,” he said, “You have to get here, this isn’t something you want to miss.” I caught the train up to NYC the next day. They broke into strains of New Speedway, and I was wondering about how this was going to turn out. You tell me.

That is the mastery of Phil Lesh. In the passing, the next song was West LA Fadeaway, and the second one was better than the first. Here’re two of the 3 Grateful Dead guitarists

And the guy filling the lower octaves is filling it all. That’s the salient feature of Phil’s playing. It added texture to the music. It added rhythm and melody, it added the beat and tempo, but it also bounced in and out of the basal foundation. He played to and off the lead guitar and the second guitar, he added emphasis and he smoothed the way through the transition. He could bounce, and swing, and fade into the background to layout a foundational bass line and he could come right up to the front and plant his foot down with the thundering emphatic “Phil Bomb”, one that would rattle your entire chest cavity. And he composed the best 16-22 note progression in the history of music. Taking Jerry out of the transitive nightfall of diamonds.

We have a young son, a millenial jazz musician. I copied this off an Instagram post of his. Sometimes you just let the young ‘uns do the talking, they’re so very good at it.

Some time ago, when I was a young man, we used to have two species of the larger yellow mayflies that hatched in the spring. There were the E. Invaria and E. Rotunda. There was also an ongoing argument about whether or not smaller sulphur that appeared a little later in the day was just a smaller version of one of these or an Ephemerella Dorothea. The folks who professed to know a lot more than I could ever hope to know exclaimed, loudly, that the E. Dorothea was a rare thing and all these yellow bugs were one or other of the Invaria/Rotunda crew.

Now the biologists tell us that the Invaria and Rotunda are the same beast, the Dorothea is in fact reasonably common and one of the Western PMDs (the one they called the E. Infrequens is actually a subspecies of the Dorothea.

Latin not withstanding, suffice it to say that there is a yellowish mayfly that hatches in the spring and possibly early summer all across the East and Midwest that makes up the most prolific hatch and spinner fall I have ever witnessed.

This video may look like it’s been through some AI mill, but in fact the E. Invaria were so thick that they were swarming all over the camera. This is a tiny creek Frank and I often fish that holds some huge trout. This video, typical of Invaria activity on this stream gives an idea of the abundance of bugs in the water.

Here’s another one of a larger stream with the spinners collecting over the riffles getting ready to do their version of the horizontal boogie. This one has the added benefit of showing Frank give a vivid demonstration of how the other shore always looks like it’s the better one. So you wade across, and then the shore you were originally on looks better, so you wade back, and so on and so forth.

A lifetime ago, back when I was in grad school, there were 2 boats and a very few guides on the Delaware River. I would run trips when school allowed. Today, of course the Delaware is a bit like Grand Central Station during a particularly busy period. The Delaware system would, and probably still does, provide 3 fishable Invaria hatches during the course of the day. The East Branch had a hatch during the morning hours, it’s smaller water making it suitable for wade fishing.

The West Branch would start showing hatches as soon as the water hit 55 degrees, which during the spring happens in early to mid afternoon.

And from the Bard Parker pool on downwards it was an evening phenomenon.

Smaller waters show the hatches at all sorts of times of the day. This little stream, with it’s share of larger fish shows it’s Invarias during the early afternoon

when the light is strong, and every detail clearly visible.

And this one, about an hour’s drive away has it’s bugs hatch as the sun goes down and the river mist comes crawling down.

And they provide nice, fishable hatches from big rivers ranging from big brawling ones that need boats to fish well, or little rivulets you can jump across if need be.

Hatches start as early as late March down in the very southern reaches of the Invaria habitat and last well into July and August on some waters. The duns almost always hatch in abundance, and the spinner falls are beautifully languid, and the fish always come out to play. With the added benefit that one can often catch at least two hatches and one spinner fall every day.

The Ephemerella Invaria belongs to the crawler type of mayfly. It has a slender, cylindrical nymph, the type most nymph patterns are aimed to represent. They can range in color from a dark brown to a lighter tannish brown. A shedding instar can be very light tan.

The nymphs live in moderately fast to fast-ish water and show a fair amount of drift when hatching. Some of that drifitng is just generally downstream at depth, some on the rise to the surface and some on the surface as they hatch. On streams with prolific hatches on can often see a fair number of nymphs drifting along in the film. In cases where I know a hatch is about to occur I will fish a nymph, and I’ll always let if kick up at the end of the drift and rise slowly to the surface.

I tie nymph patterns in a very wide range of colors, mainly because I fish a very wide swath of area. But I’m not sure how much the exact shade matters, as long as it’s reasonably close to the local naturals. If you’re fishing during the period of nymph movement just prior to the actual hatch, I suppose you would like to present something close to the natural, though I’m not sure I’d be willing to swear to that. My Invaria nymph patterns range from a simple Pheasant tail tied a la Frank Sawyer, to an extremely light tan nymph and everything in between. I tie them with and without bead heads, and fish them both with great success.

Once I start seeing fish on the surface my tactics become somewhat one tracked. I’m a simple engineer. I don’t know from anthropomorphic trout determining which phase of the hatching bug is least likely to fly away and when. I also don’t understand the mystery of trout seeing emergers and not fully hatched duns. If a dun must drift 100 ft to escape its nymphal shuck, then unless that bug and every other bug got to a trout’s position within a 100 ft of hitting the surface, that trout must see some fully grown duns. In fact in any hatch, if we assume the hatching is evenly spaced above the trout, is has to see equal numbers of bugs at various stages of the hatch. So unless the trout is right at the head of hatching territory or right at the tail, it’s going to see a mix of all of them. But what do I know?

It’s so much easier to see a dun, see what it’s doing, see the fish take it and so that’s what I fish - all the time. I don’t have to rely on all sorts of skills I don’t have, or have the time to learn.

When I was a young man, I needed good luck,
I'm a little bit older now and I know my stuff

So, during the hatch, I just go ahead and fish a dun. The fish never seem to care. In my grad school days, armed with a copy of Hatches II I was all gung-ho fishing a comparadun for this and a variety of hatches. I soon learned that, while indestructible in the long term, a comparadun is only good for one or two fish before it becomes a sodden mess that can only be kept afloat with copious amounts of false casting. The kind that makes me wonder if the angler is angling for trout or owls. We’ve all seen those instances where you say to yourself, upon watching someone, “Jeez put the darned line on the water,” while the guy continues for another 23 false casts. That person’s probably fishing a comparadun.

I’ve talked a bunch about my favored patterns in a past piece on Dry Flies, and for the sake of brevity, here’s a link.

And I tie them in quantity. Mainly because I fish the Invaria hatches for about 5 months in the year and the same patterns do just fine for PMDs out west and some other yellow mayflies adding another 2-3 months to their period of use.

There are two points of note about the E. Invaria duns. The first is the size. Even though there is a wide variation in size, most Invaria duns are much larger than people give them credit. In their book, Htaches II, Caucci and Nastasi estimate a size range of 7.5 - 10.5 mm for this species. Other authors estimate a similar size, except most call out a larger minimum size. But overall it seems somewhere between 9-10.5 mm is an appropriate size for the dun’s body. On a Tiemco TMC 100 this would be somewhere between a #10 and #14. The TMC 102Y, on of my favorites would be a 13 with a marginal, late season #15. The same sort of size would apply for hooks from other manufacturers. Later in the season as the flies get smaller I may switch to #14-15.

The second is the coloration. When viewed flying they range through a whole gamut of yellows, mustards, greenish yellows, ochres, and such. They do the same thing when seen from underneath, which is what the fish see. It is interesting to note that on some waters the duns can be an extremely pale yellow. Also, the females can show an orange or green egg mass. I’m not sure how much the detailed color matters but I have noticed a definite difference in the trout's prefernce for the correct tone - i.e. they like a light fly if the naturals are lighter in color and a darker one if the naturals are dark.

Of course conditions like this, when this trout was taken make color of less importance and size/silohouette the more likely criteria.

Waters that remain cold into the summer often have enshrouding river mist at the time of the Invaria hatch and spinnerfall, especially since their native habitat is a part of the country marked by high humidity in the summer. We see this on streams big and small.

It makes for some interesting fishing.

On streams small and big, as the shadows lengthen “and the night comes so quiet and it's close on the heels of the day” the Invaria spinners collect at the riffles and begin their rising and falling mating dance. The ritual begins with the spinners coming out from the trees where they have spent the last day or so.

The swarms then start migrating upstream until they reach the riffles. They then begin a pulsating dance.

Eventually falling to the water and drifting down to become an easy meal for the waiting trout. Invaria spinner falls provide great fishing. Just as in the case of the duns the spinners can vary substantially in color.

I like to tie my spinners extremely sparse. You should too. I would also recommend Goddard and Clarke’s book “The Trout and the Fly” for an excellent treatise on spinner pattern design and deployment.

Midmorning Invaria hatch, fish are rising up like birds.

This is one of the fish

And some more

A mother swan and her cygnets came cruising by and it brought to mind this craze about tin shot. The swan is a royal bird in England. And they feed on aquatic snails, either stuck to the weeds or picked off the bottom of clear streams. Lead shot left on the bottom of streams looked like those aquatic snails. But only in certain sizes. So the Brits banned the use of lead shot in certain sizes (they still allow it in smaller and larger size, so this isn’t a general environmental control thing). I can understand that. But then sometime in the 1980s the good folk at Orvis got to hear about this. You have to realize something about them, at least back then. Orvis, as a culture can’t help but adopt something if it seems to be snooty. If the Brits did it, by their reckoning, it had to be classy. I mean these guys were trying to sell tweed breeks to American hunters and fishermen in the 80s and 90s (that’s in the 1980s!!!). In America only golfers have the gall to dress like this:

But there you have it. And that began the craze of non-toxic split shot in the US. Even though most of the lead split shot used by fly fishermen actually comes from the UK.

Lead is toxic. There’s no argument there. Any amount of lead added to the environment is more lead in the environment. But the amount of lead added by fly fisherman is negligible, compared to all the other sources of lead. But okay, on an absolute level you can argue against it - but I’m not sure you should do so if you drove to the stream you’re fishing. I don’t care what kind of vehicle you got there in, unless you rode a bicycle you added something detrimental to the environment. Which of course was also done in the manufacture and shipping of your bicycle.

Next I don’t understand these flyboxes that weigh about 23 pound each.

You’re meant to be carrying flies, not the boxes. These things weigh so much the weight of the flies is inconsequential, but more importantly they limit how many flies you can carry by loading you down with the weight of the plastic. The old DeWitt boxes were the opposite. They weight about 12 gms each and can carry about 9 gazzillion flies each.

I’m not sure what these guys are building these fly boxes for. I know we have an ongoing weight problem in this country, but you could have a hippopotamus sit on one of those things and not hurt it. On the other hand don’t drop one on your foot. Wading boot or not, you’re likely to suffer severe blunt force trauma. And the cost, Holy Mother of Christ! $65 for a fly box! I’d pay it if I thought it would catch me more fish. I suppose you could throw the box into the river and cause shock waves to bring the fish to the surface, but I’m not sure that works for me.

Then there’s the Einstein who came up with these slotted nymph boxes. I think they were on the right track with the slim foam lined box.

Here’s a severely depleted box of Purple and Blue Jerries (My fly names tend to a Grateful Dead bias, but that’s my weirdness) in its usual disarray. But I can pack about 350-400 flies into it (There are 40 in the first two rows). But then they decided that’s too many flies in one box, so they deiced to take some space away from us by cutting little triangles into the foam, and little slots to go with them. Now you can only use half the space. I guess there’s an argument to made saying you only lose half the flies when you lose a box. I’m sure you’re wondering about the mental acuity of this CosmicJohn dude. Doesn’t he know those slots are for holding flies. Like this:

Right. And after about an hour down the trail all the flies are sitting loose in the box to come spewing out onto the stream side maze as soon as you pop open the box. And of course there are the nimrods who combine the slotted foam boxes with the multilayer armor and super dense silicone foam to give you a box that holds about 13 flies, weighs in at a good 15 ounces and costs about $80. This weighs and costs about as much, is as good at holding flies but is a whole lot better tasting.

My buddy Frank goes on a pilgrimage to Montana every year. He always comes back with something a little whackier the year before. A couple of years ago I’m standing by him and he opens a bottle of something and clouds of gasoline waft out. “What’s that?” I said.

I though he said, “Viagra.”

“Frank,” I said, “I think you have this whole leaded/unleaded thing figured out wrong old buddy, what you’re looking for comes in a little blue pill.”

“No man,” he says, “This is the best fly floatant there ever was.”

“Jeez Frank, they gave up mixing paraffin wax in gasoline around my Grandfather’s time, somewhere around the time Dame Juliana was writing her stuff.”

So let me get this straight - the same jamokes who won’t throw a lead split shot into a stream have no issues dowsing their flies in gasoline before casting them onto the water? Okay then, just though I’d ask.

How about a nice disc drive reel for your new 2 wt rod? Whiskey, Tango Foxtrot? There really are folks out there peddling that stuff.

I’m not even going to ask anyone to make this make sense.

In all their history, I’ve found about 3 things Orvis got right. The first was the CFO fly reel. I have a thing about CFOs. The second was the Super Tac L Pak vest, something they had in their line, and sold for way over 30 years. Some guy there needed to ask why they managed to keep selling them for 30 years. Unless it was a bunch of folks buying them to give as gifts to folks they didn’t like, there had to be a reason.

The thing was perfectly sized to carry 4 to 6 big Dewitt fly boxes in the big front pockets, a bunch of slim nymph boxes in the breast pocket, and a whole fly shops worth of other crap. It had big pouches in the back and could do everything but stand on its head and whistle Dixie out its butt. Fortunately mine’s still going strong, though I think after this year I’m going to have to find someone to copy one for me. A tailor in India or some such place would be able to do it. Because the geniuses around here have moved on to assorted contraptions such as this misbegotten son of a drunken night between a backpack and a fishing vest.

Or maybe it’s needed to carry the 3 lb fly boxes!

There’s a lot of this sort of stuff, but that was just my rant for the day.

In the meantime here’s a pretty fish. I took it on a 13’16” 8 wt Sage Sonic Spey rod, a click pawl Hardy Bougle reel and a 31/2” orange and black tube fly. The jumps alone were worth the price of admission.

Soon all this will melt, and fill the little creeks and streams that merge into the bigger rivers. Streams that are gentle flows in summer and fall

become raging torrents, thundering their way down to large rivers.

The water is turbulent, and churning, often stained, but relentless, pouring down, for days on end. Even as it draws down, as the runoff cools, days and weeks can pass before it gets to, what some may consider, prime levels.

But the fish are still there. And they’re still feeding. And they aren’t fighting the roiling heavy water. They’re sitting in comfortable spots, waiting for all the stuff that gets dislodged by the currents to come drifting by. And they are remarkably easy to catch, if you can get to them.

Personally, I like fishing the big rivers when the water is high. A trusty oarsman, a stable boat, a good long rod, and the trout are there for the taking. You just have to be able to get to them.

Forget the slots, and the runs, and the deep water where some people are slinging about two pounds of lead attached to their leader, or half a chicken wrapped around their hooks. Forget the baloney about flies that move water, and all the guff about a big fly tempting a trout in troubled waters. That’s not where the answer lies. It lies in daintily picking apart the margins with finesse. Often done while whizzing by at the Mach 1, but nevertheless a delicate task like a microsurgeon with his micro knives.

Fishing the margins is always a delicate task. There is a narrow slot right along the bank, where the current is soft, the water relatively shallow and food abundant. These are the slots that need to be fished.

I am by training an aerospace engineer, a fluid dynamicist. In the world of fluid dynamics we have a phenomenon called cavity flow. On broad terms cavity flow, to the fisherman is just a back eddy. But in actuality cavity flows are myriad and 3-dimensional. The diagrams below show a number of different cavity flow conditions.

But the thing to remember is that these cavity flows can be created both in the direction of the depth and the distance away from the bank. The open cavity in (a) is one everyone knows about and on a small scale they are difficult to fish. But the other cavities have large sections where the flow is linear and one directional. The streamlines shown above reflect the state of the flow.

A simple matter of fluid dynamics is that at the interface between the bank or bed and the water the actual flow speed is exactly 0. These transitional cavities are the holding spots for the fish and the external currents as the dip in and out bring the food into the cavity and hence to the fish. Now imagine that the solid wall we’re looking at here is actually the stream bank. The cavities can be formed by indentations in the bank itself, or by other obstacles such as root balls, rocks, bridge abutments, riprap, or whatever else may cause a slight impediment to the flow. Each and every one of those provides a have for trout.

Look at this section along a Colorado stream in runoff. That’s where those fish will hang. Once you get a fly in there you’ll realize that your problem actually will be how slow the water actually is.

It isn’t always high water that causes fish to hold in the margins. The characteristics of some rivers, or areas of rivers force trout into the margins at any time of the year. Here’s an Eastern river in July at nominal water flows. But the conditions in this area are such that there’s a fast moving center section and a nice soft margin along the banks, particularly river right.

That’s the left side of your view. The trout line up in that soft water and with a little dint and persuasion you can walk right up to them. That’s my fly line hanging over the water

Big, ripping stretches of water offer up the same sort of thing along the shoreline. This is a section of the Yarmony Rapids on the Colorado. Get the right kind of boatman and probe those margins. Big fish live there, and they’re suckers for a well placed fly.

The fish hang in the margins because the flow is gentle (sometimes exceedingly so), and yet the main flow pumps food into these margin areas. In some rivers the margins may make up only 1-2% of the overall volume of the stream and yet hold more than 90% of the fish. But there are some tricks to catching these fish.

The first thing to remember is that a fly outside the margin in unlikely to pull a fish to it. You’re trying to get a trout out into inhospitable water, and one where the fly is zipping by. This is a low probability game. So casting accuracy is a must.

I like fishing from a boat. And I’ll tell you why. But that’s not always possible, so see if you can implement these strategies wade fishing. First, don’t cast perpendicular to the bank. This spells disaster in many ways. Before all is said and done, I’m going to convince you to fish with more than on fly on your leader. If you agree, you’ll find that casting perpendicular to the bank will inevitably point the point flies onto the ground, if the top fly goes where it’s supposed to go.

A cast made parallel to the streamflow allows one to drop the flies into the right spot, without potentially getting one hung up on shore. It also positions the flies for a longer float in the holding zone, as opposed to the faster current pulling the fly away from the holding area. With one exception I like to fish downstream, when plying the margins. Trout will typically hold in front or to the side of boulders or behind them. Unless they are some distance behind the boulder they’re really tough to catch. I always refuse to apply some anthropomorphic explanation to trout behavior, so this is merely an observation. The ones in front and to the side are much easier to catch.

The best way to get a fly to the fish that are easier to catch is from upstream. The currents around those rocks and in the cavities make fishing a dead drift downstream nigh on impossible. Casting into these margins from the same shore is an equally tricky job. You still have to come at the margin from the stream side or run the peril of dropping your line on stream side vegetation, rocks, etc. Even a couple of feet offshore would make it easier but the margin fish lie in those margins.

The productive margins aren’t just a high water or extremely fast water phenomenon. Even after the snows have melted and gone, and as the trees start turning to shades of gold, the trout will still congregate in those margins.The food is still just as plentiful, or rare, but it doesn’t go whipping by. There are miles of water like this on rivers all over the world.

Those 2 feet or so from the shore out towards the stream can be extremely productive. But for all practical purposes this is like fishing a stream that’s about 4-5 feet wide. You have to be senaky and you have to keep moving.

So whether it’s a brawling high water river or a late season gentler version of itsef, it’s just better fished from a boat, if you can get to one. You drift down the river casting ahead of yourself, gently laying your flies down in the margin and surgically dissecting it to find the fish. This chunky cutthroat and sleek rainbow both came from the margins of the Colorado downstream of Glenwood Springs on fine late October day marked by spitting snow and a westerly breeze.

They both took dry flies about a foot off shore.

Rigging up to fish the margins is where the trick lies. Obviosuly you want a rod that can list a fair amount of line up and lay it back down with the minimum amount of fuss. Time spent false casting and such is just wated time. You want a line with a long front taper because you want the ability to left, mend and cast without having to drag in line. Don’t try shooting to get distance, you’ll just end up in the shoreline foliage. If you can’t find a sensible long taper weight forward, just buy a double taper. It’ll do just fine. Leaders, again don’t need anything special. Just drop them down to whatever size you like. I have, for about 50 years, used a formula of fly size/4 for dries and fly_size/3 for nymphs. Does me just fine. Explain to me why a trout looks past a hook and it still shy of 6X tippet and maybe I’ll buy into all that fine tippet horse hockey. It’s not the size of the tippet, it’s the cast management. I do go for finer tippets on nymphs because I want them to sink fast.

Most of the margins can be fished with tungsten bead headed nymphs. The tungsten gets them down quick, which is what you need because these drifts may not be long.

If for one reason or another I can’t use a beadhead I’ll hang a couple of slipshot aong the leader. Somewhere on this Substack I have articles on nymphs and the rigging thereof. All of that applies here. Just that yu want the flies to get down as fast as they can. I use the most number of nymphs I can for the water I’m fishing. Some places that allows for 2 nymphs, others 1 and in Colorado I always fish 3. It’s just the maximum number of flies minus 1. That minus one is held aside for the dry fly.

When you fish the margins you must have a dry fly in the mix. You must. With the right pattern, those margin fish will just eat it up.

Since the length of the slot you’re fishing can vary from the size of a wash basin to several hundred yards long, it’s best if you get any subsurface flies you’re using down to the fish as soon as possible. This post of mine talks about various nymph rigs.

You’ll notice that my rigging actively fights having to throw two and a half ounces of lead on your leader. Any of those rigs will do, but if you’re using beadhead flies you’ve automatically created what I call the maggot rig. If you aren’t using beads the maggot rig is a good one to go with. When fishing margins with a sunken fly in the mix I typically fish with a LaFontaine Double Wing. I’ve caught more fish with some color variation of that fly than any other fly. But that’s me, you do you.

Fish in the margin seem to take dry flies at all times of the year. However, once the runoff is done, big rivers like the Colorado are the playground of margin dry fly eaters. This is not just the bank sippers during a hatch. The margins of stretches such as these

I love fshing rivers like the Colorado with two dry flies, Double wings during the day and a pair of caddises in the evening (unless a hatch or spinner fall makes me go that way). Those fish just slurp them down.

Of course if you’re fishing the margins you have to pay attention to terrestrials. The trout are used to seeing these. The best trout stream in my world has a section that gives you about 3 miles of water where you can just slide an ant and a beetle along at no more than a foot and a half from shore. People would ooh and aah and write tomes about these mile long riffles.

Flotillas of guides go merrily thingamabobbing down these riffles every day. The ones with slightly more advanced sports have them cast out to feel like they’re doing something. We go down with one of these

and something like this on the leader

Fishing them right up in the margin along the bushes. And we take a fish or two every few yards.

They’re sitting there, unmolested, unafraid and ever willing. The section from here down to where this meets the big river is probably the best caddis dry fly fishing anywhere. This is late summer ast low flow. But the bare stoney bank shows you where we started the year. for the next 3 or 4 miles the fish are all tucked in along those banks. The sit there, of an evening, slurping down every caddis that comes by.

Sometimes the only ones coming by seem to be the ones I throw at them, but it doesn’t seem to bother them. These are nice chunky browns with shoulders to them.

And just so much fun. Just run those flies along the edge right up to the front of the rock forming the cavity. That’s where they will be. Even large, slow moving pools often have a nice little streamflow on the margins.

The margin of the far bank along this stretch of river is a haven for evening risers at just about any time of year, even on days like this.

Everything I do when fishing the margins sticks to my mantra of fishing multiple flies, downstream. But there are two exceptions. The first is fishing hoppers. On the late summer and early fall afternoons as the sun warms them up and the mountain winds flows down the valley hoppers in the Rockies set up an almighty crackling. At that time of the year the high plains grasses are in a burst of color from the autumnal monsoon (yes, for the Easterners reading this - that is a thing) The river vending its way through these grasses often nudges right up to the verge.

The crackling hoppers whirl out of the grasses like a spiraling, flying dervish crashing about from one clump to the other. Every so often one of them misses the mark and ends up in the stream, whereupon they begin a hasty retreat to shore. And waiting there, heading them off from their quest are various and sundry spotted fish. The best way to get them is to splat the hopper down close to the shore and twitch it, then let it drift and twitch it again. None of that works with multiple flies on the rig.

The other exception is fishing streamers. I do fish multiple streamers, on the rare occasion that I do fish streamers (I just can’t get past the fact that fishing streamers is work). But when fishing the margin I like to cast them upstream of where I am, mend the line up parallel to the bank and then draw the flies downstream.

If you can, when the fly reaches the bottom of the strip, stop your line for a second and lift the fly almost to the top and then gently drop it back down. It’s a move my friend and super guide Kevin Wildgen calls the dipsy-doodle. And it works.

Big rivers, high waters all seem to conjure up images of trout wandering the depths. And I suppose a few do. But it seems most trout, even in those big rivers only occupy a small strip of water along the shore. yes some will hold in other structure, midstream and such, but if you don’t want to fight currents, and low probability spots, head to the margins - that’s where the fish are.

Stan asked me to step outside and cast one, and so began my lifelong affair with Sage rods. My rod racks today look like this

A walking talking advertisement for Sage.

So when Sage announced two new series of rods I couldn’t wait to get my hands on them. I finally did, and that’s what led to this story. Those first RP’s were nice rods, but they lacked a certain sprightliness to them. Then came the RPL series in about 1989. Grad school was done by then and I equipped myself with a fine arsenal of RPL and RPLX rods from 3 to 12 Weight. The 12 Weights were a disappointment. I broke 4 in 2 days at Homassassa Springs. They’d snap at the ferrule if you tried to lift a giant tarpon on 16 lb tippet.But the rest of them were extremely fine rods. I fished the 4 and 5 weights for trout all over the world. The 590 RPL made a wonderful Hopper road when fishing from a boat. I fished those trout rods into 2014 or 2015. I also fished the 8100 and 9100 RPLs for Salmon and Steelhead until about 5 years ago.

There were a whole plethora of rods in between and none that actually caught my fancy the way the RPLs had. I did pick up a few Z-axis rods along the way. They were nice enough. In fact the 390-Z Axis made for a nice little dry fly rod.

I had a lot of fun fishing BWOs with it on the Colorado River around State Bridge, poking and probing the gentle runs along the shore.

But then somewhere around 2010-2011 Sage introduced the One Series. I bought the first one of these in an emergency from Roaring Fork Anglers in Glenwood Springs in the fall of 2011. I had flown out to Colorado and left my rod bag in the car at BWI airport (that issue has now been remedied by keeping a set of tackle in Colorado). I what I thought was a compromise I bought a Sage One series 496. The next day I bought another.

Then I got my hands on its bigger brother the 10 ft 4100. Now we were getting into some serious business. This thing was a beast. It could throw a set of dries out to the Eastern Tennessee tailwater fish that won’t let you get within 70 feet, or horse in a chunky brown trying to make for the closest root ball.

I fish a lot from drift boats, and I like to have enough rods set up for whatever contingencies may arise. That normally means I’m carrying 6-8 rods on the boat. Given that we live in two different states, I have ended up with a butt load of rods. When the dust settled I did end up with half a dozen 496s and as many 4100s. I also have a smattering of 390s, 490s and then the heavier ones - the 7100s and Spey rods. The One Series was the most serious rod I had come across since the old 1980s Loomis IMXs. It did have a couple of clunkers in there - the 5100 was chunky at best. But it was uniformly the best fly rod series until then.

Then one day they stopped making it and introduced the X. They made a huge noise about it, and after having fished the One I thought we were in for a pleasant surprise. I ran out to cast some. They were a surprise indeed, but I wouldn’t use the word pleasant. How could someone who had come up with the One Series miss so badly? Every X rod I cast was designed wrong. The tips were stiff, the mid and butt sections soft. It was as if the person designing them had absolutely no clue of what happens when a fly rod is used to cast a line. I don’t know if there was a change in the design team, or what. Maybe there were a bunch of happy mushrooms, or left handed cigarettes making the rounds on Bainbridge Island, but everything about that set of rods was just plain wrong.

Being a fly rod junky I did have to keep feeding the jones. So I tried the Scott Radians - nice rods, but merely OK. I still have a couple left over in Colorado. Got rid of the rest.

Then calamity struck. We were coming off a long fall day on the Colorado, taking out at the truck rest area at Dino. Packed everything away and the next day I realized I’d lost 3 Sage Ones. I called Sage and tried to coax them into making some for me. They politely told me to go pound sand. But this young man told me to watch out for something they had coming out in a few weeks. It was the Sonic. The best thing since the One. I sometimes suspect it is just the One wrapped in a green skin and a little lighter. But it was a great rod. Seemed like Sage had redeemed themselves from the X disaster. I have a bunch of them, and they look pretty sitting next to fish.

I even got a bunch of them to with which to chase the bigger ones.

Balance had been returned to the universe. Life was good again. Before moving on I should probably touch on the TCR, TCX, Igniter side of things. I love fast fly rods. I especially love fast, light line rods. The TCR, TCX pedigree of rods has gotten successively better. There is a place for them in certain conditions and I always had a few.

I got rid of them and filled the gap with the Igniters which I fish in 4, 5 and 6 wt for tough conditions or where I need to lift some heft stuff off the water. The Igniter is worlds ahead of the TCR, TCX and Mod family. It feels like a One series on steroids and if it wasn’t for a lack of longer rods, it would probably have become a favorite.

Then Sage came out with the R8. My friend Charlie Perkins who runs Mayfly Outfitters in Michigan (and it’s one fine establishment) sent me a few to try and buy. I first went to the 4100. I had visions of the X seething through my mind. I put that guy aside and tried the 5100. Now that was a nice rod. I haven’t been able to find a nice 10ft 5 wt. The Loomis NRX+ is a little clubby, the One series 5100 was a bit of a dog, the Radian 5100 was a Radian (a little bit of a gentleman in a rough crowd), the Scott Centric should not be spoken of in polite company (It’s their X). But here was a nice 5100. So that went into the rack. I’ve fished it a lot and got a second one for out west. Next I tried the 596 (too bad Sage gave up on the 496s). The best 596 I had fished until then was actually the Sonic. The R8 was a really nice rod. So that went into the rack, as did the 490. I don’t fish many 6 wts and that region is filled with a couple of Ones and Sonic and an Igniter. We’ll see what else comes down the line.

So now to the new rods - the Sage Arrow and the Power R8. Let’s start with the Power R8. This is one for the books and a few will be acquired. It picks right up where the Igniter left off. Nice stiff mid and butt section, a responsive tip, casts like a dream. Wish they’d put a 4100 and 5100 into the line up, but I suppose you can’t get every silly thing you dream of.

The Arrow series were a mixed bag. I immediately noticed the absence of the 390. I love those rods for streams such as these.

The 490 was a yeoman sort of rod. Those things are so ubiquitous you really need something special to catch your attention. The One series, Sonic and R8 do that. The Arrow is OK. After that everything else I cast was just a X in a different set of clothes, with the possible exception of the 596. The 596 was more along the lines of what a rod should be, but it would suffer in comparison to the R8, or the Sonic if you can find one. The rest were marked by soft middles, stiff tips, this so called “progressive flex into your hand”. We used to call that a medium to slow rod. I’ll give them another shot, but at first glance seem like the X designers got their shot at effing up another series on this one. Too bad.

In the meantime here’s a picture of a nice Sonic with an old CFO. The fish isn’t too shabby either.