Trout Eyes Read online

  BOOKS BY WILLIAM G. TAPPLY

  Brady Coyne mystery novels

  Death at Charity’s Point • The Dutch Blue Error

  Follow the Sharks • The Marine Corpse • Dead Meat

  The Vulgar Boatman • A Void in Hearts

  Dead Winter • Client Privilege

  The Spotted Cats • Tight Lines • The Snake Eater

  The Seventh Enemy • Close to the Bone

  Cutter’s Run • Muscle Memory • Scar Tissue

  Past Tense • A Fine Line • Shadow of Death

  Nervous Water • Out Cold

  Other novels

  Thicker than Water (with Linda Barlow)

  First Light (with Philip R. Craig)

  Second Sight (with Philip R. Craig)

  Bitch Creek • Gray Ghost

  Books on the outdoors

  Those Hours Spent Outdoors

  Opening Day and Other Neuroses • Home Water Near and Far

  Sportsman’s Legacy • A Fly Fishing Life • Bass Bug Fishing

  Upland Days • Pocket Water

  The Orvis Guide to Fly Fishing for Bass • Gone Fishin’

  Other Non-fiction

  The Elements of Mystery Fiction: Writing the Modern Whodunit

  Copyright © 2007, 2015 by William G. Tapply

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Print ISBN: 978-1-63450-325-9

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-0111-3

  Printed in the United States of America

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Foreword

  PART I: BROOKIES, BROWNS, AND BOWS

  1. Virtual Angling

  2. Trickle Treat

  3. Fishing for Stories

  4. Hatching the Match

  5. The Truth About Dry-Fly Fishing

  6. Last Call

  PART II: PASS THE SALT

  7. Fear and Loathing in Belize—Part I

  8. Fear and Loathing in Belize—Part II

  9. The Line Storm

  10. Stripers and Floaters

  PART III: FLIES AND GEAR

  11. The Pink Sarah

  12. The X Factor

  13. From Bobs to Bugs

  14. Harm’s Way

  15. Toy Rods

  PART IV: FLY FISHING HERE AND THERE

  16. Porcupine Brook

  17. The Natives of Minipi

  18. Alas, the Bighorn

  19. The Norfolk Tailwater

  20. Trout in the Land of the Big Feet

  21. Volkswagen Cove

  PART V: FLY-FISHING CONUNDRUMS

  22. Thinkin’ Mean

  23. Moon Down

  24. Dobbers and Trailers

  25. Animal Wrongs

  26. Mouse Ears and Hendricksons

  27. Bass Bugging Myths and Misconceptions

  28. Trout Eyes

  Epilogue: A Birthday Trout

  Foreword

  Fly-fishing is a full-time occupation. Or preoccupation. Increasingly, I find that when I’m not on the water, I’m thinking about being on the water, or about the water itself, what’s in it and what’s floating on it and how pure it is, or about the fish that might be living in it and how I might catch them. I talk with my friends—and with strangers, too—about rivers and fish and flies and rods and reels. I daydream about brooks and rivers, ponds and lakes and oceans. I read fly-fishing magazines and books and watch cable television shows about fly fishing. I go to club meetings and shows. I haunt tackle shops.

  Having fly fishing on the brain is almost as good as doing it. Actually, sometimes it’s better. It hardly ever rains on my daydreams, and I rarely get skunked.

  The musings in this book are the product of the past several years of my whimsical and undisciplined fly-fishing fantasies and fancies, as I remember the places I’ve been, the people I’ve met, the fish I’ve caught, and the fish I’ve failed to catch. These stories address the situations that make me happy, and angry, and sad, and philosophical, and frustrated.

  Mostly happy.

  Here there are stories about waters that have meant something to me—small places like Porcupine Brook, big places like the Atlantic Ocean, famous places like the Bighorn River, faraway places like Patagonia. There are stories about fish—particular fish like a tarpon I once met and a permit who met me halfway—and species of fish that especially interest me, like largemouth bass and striped bass and, of course, trout.

  I write about casting and strategies, flies and bugs, equipment and rigs, and even how to catch fish, but I urge you not to take me too seriously on any of these subjects.

  Here there are stories about people and stories inspired by people. They are all real people, although some, like my father and virtually all of his friends, and Dave Schuller and Don Cooper, are no longer with me. They are my regular partners Andy Gill and Marshall Dickman; my Maine men Jason Terry, Keith Wegener and Blaine Moores; and, my flyfishing, head-shrinking, poker-playing, world-traveling buddies Steven Cooper, Elliot Schildkrout, Jonathan Kolb and Randy Paulsen.

  Many other angling companions, too: Dick Brown, Skip Rood, Art Currier, Tom Rosenbauer, Barry and Cathy Beck, Jay Cassell, Phil Caputo, Rod Cochran, Rip Cunningham, Art Scheck, John Likakis, Phil Monahan, Joe Healy, Nick Lyons, Datus Proper, Ted Williams, Will Ryan, Tom Fuller, Spence Conley, Phil and Shirley Craig, Fran Verdoliva, Jack Gartside, Cliff Hauptman, Jeff Christenson, Rick Boyer, Andy Warshaw, Steve Wight, Mike Blaisdell, Bill Sheik, Hans Carroll, Paul Koulouris, Tony Brown, John Brady, Joe Phillips, Sam Downing, Charles Poindexter, John Barr, Jim Smith, Ian James, T. L. Lauerman, Tom Murray, Jeremiah Gulley, Bob White, Gary McCown, Gary Pensinger.

  And my father’s partners who always included me: Harold Blaisdell, Ed Zern, Corey Ford, Lee Wulff, Put Putnam, Frank Woolner, Gorham Cross, Joe Bates.

  And guides Bill Rohrbacher, Bob Lamm, Fred Jennings, John Gulley, Wayne Reed, Bob Bergquist, Martin Carranza, Gustavo Southart, Taku, Pancho, Neale Streeks, Brant Oswald, Mike Lawson, Randy Savage, Chad Hamlin, Jared Powell, Ben Floyd, Bob McAdams, Harry Lane, Phil Farnsworth, Ed Taylor, Walter Ungermann, George Smith, Andrew Cummings, Nat Moody, Sammy Knowles, Mike Hintlian, Fran Verdoliva, John Sharkey, Tony Biski, Denise Barton, John Berry.

  And, especially, my wife Vicki, and my kids Mike, Melissa and Sarah, and my stepsons Blake and Ben.

  Of course, there are countless others whose paths I’ve crossed in more than half a century on the water, and who’ve crossed mine, who have inspired me to look at my fly-fishing passions from unexpected angles and have thus inspired me to write about it.

  These are true stories, or essentially true. I am scrupulous about avoiding exaggeration and falsehood, but I don’t hesitate to reconstruct conversations or to condense experiences if doing so will enhance the Truth.

  I have included here one short story in which fishing (but not fly fishing) is important, although not the point of it. Short stories are always
about characters. If you want only Truth, you won’t hurt my feelings if you skip the story.

  Most of the pieces in this book have been previously published. Many of them appeared on the back page of American Angler, where I write the “Reading the Currents” column every issue. Several others were first published in Gray’s Sporting Journal or Field & Stream. Editors Phil Monahan, James Babb, and Slaton White deserve all the credit—for their high standards, for their guidance, for their tolerance, and for their friendship, as well as for their uncanny editing.

  Chickadee Farm

  Hancock, New Hampshire

  June 2006

  PART I

  Brookies, Browns, and Bows

  “Trout are quite unaware of their exalted status.”

  —Harold F. Blaisdell, The Philosophical Fisherman

  “A trout river is like a book: some parts are dull and some are lively.”

  —H.G. Tapply, The Sportsman’s Notebook

  “Brook trout are generally considered to be far stupider than brown trout. On the other hand, brook-trout fishermen are probably no more stupid than brown-trout fishermen.”

  —Ed Zern, How to Catch Fishermen

  1

  Virtual Angling

  I was leaning my elbows on the bridge rail watching the water glide under me and spread into a wide slow pool. It was that dusky time of day halfway between afternoon and night when summer trout streams begin to rouse themselves. I was late for supper, but I was married to a fly fisher and would be forgiven.

  The low-angled sun slanted through the overhanging willows spreading a mottled patchwork of shadow and light upon the water. Some undulating pale mayfly spinners were dapping their abdomens on the surface, and now and then a few smaller, darker mayflies came drifting along—either the leftovers from a mid-day hatch or the heralds of an evening event to come.

  Some cumbersome craneflies and neon damsels and fluttery caddisflies were flapping around the streamside shrubbery. Swallows and waxwings were swooping over the water. Soon the bats would come out to play.

  Directly below me, in a patch of sunlight in the cushion behind the middle bridge abutment, a brown trout was finning just under the surface. I guessed he’d go fourteen or fifteen inches, a really nice fish for this particular New Hampshire stream. Periodically he’d sidle into the current seam. His dorsal fin would break the surface, his head would twist to the side, and his mouth would wink white, and then he’d ease back into his cushion. Eating emergers, I guessed.

  Three other fish were lined up along the bank downstream from a sweeper on the deep left side of the pool. They were barely dimpling the surface—the kind of riseforms that sometimes betray really big fish, but could just as easily be made by two-inch chubs. I guessed—or preferred to believe—that these were trout. Sipping spinners, I figured, though it might’ve been ants or midges. I’d try a spinner first.

  Down where the water quickened near the tailout two or three smallish fish kept splashing. A high-floating caddis skittered over them would do the job.

  But my attention was focused on that nice brown behind the abutment. He’d be the trickiest one to catch, and he was therefore the most interesting. He was coming up regularly—about once a minute. A serious feeder. Assuming I figured out what he was eating and found a good imitation in my flybox, I’d need to cast it way up under the bridge to get a drift along that current seam, and to do that I’d have to wade nearly to the middle of the pool, where, I happened to know, the water would be lapping the tops of my waders. But unless I was standing in the right place, a braid of current at the bottom of the trout’s cushion would grab my leader and drag my fly away from his feeding lane.

  Even from the middle of the stream, the only way to beat the drag would be with a puddle cast. I’d have to tie on an extra-long tippet, drive it up under the arch of the bridge on a tight loop, and stop it abruptly. If I did it right, the tippet would land in loose coils and the fly would drift draglessly right along that trout’s feeding lane, and if I’d tied on the right pattern, and if I’d timed it right, the fish would slide out of his cushion and drift back under my fly, and I’d see his back arch and then the swirl as he took it and twisted away, and I’d raise my rod tip and feel the fish’s strength and energy surge up the line and through the rod to my hand.

  “Hey, mister. Lookit that. There’s a big fish down there. See it?”

  I nearly jumped off the bridge. “You shouldn’t sneak up on a fellow like that,” I said.

  He was a kid, twelve or thirteen years old, I guessed. He’d leaned his bike against the bridge and was now standing beside me, up on tiptoes, elbows on the rail, squinting down at the water.

  “Of course I see the fish,” I added.

  “I wasn’t sneaking,” he said. “You just weren’t paying attention. I think I coulda exploded a bomb under you and you wouldn’ta noticed. You were like totally in a daze or something.”

  * * *

  My father took me with him from the beginning. When we went fishing, I was his partner, not his kid. I took my equal turn rowing the boat, paddling the canoe, or running the outboard motor, just as I tied my own clinch knots, baited my own hooks, and unsnarled my own backlashes.

  Eventually I figured out that Dad had important life-lessons in mind, but at the time I understood that taking turns was simple and obvious fairness: Everybody, even fathers, would rather fish than paddle. It never occurred to me that some parents would let the kid do all the fishing, any more than I could imagine a father never bringing his kid fishing with him.

  When I got older, my father abandoned his equal-time-with-the-paddle policy. “Just grab the rod, get up there in the bow, and don’t argue about it,” he’d say when we launched our canoe.

  “We should flip for it,” I’d say.

  “I told you, don’t argue. You’re supposed to honor your father.”

  “We’ll swap ends later, then.”

  “We’ll see.”

  As often as not when I figured it should be his turn and suggested it was time for him to fish and me to paddle, he’d say, “Nah. You go ahead. I’m having fun.”

  After a while, I came to realize that he really was having fun. He liked maneuvering the canoe to give me an easy cast at a good-looking spot along the bank of a bass pond or a current seam on a trout river. He got a kick out of it when his guiding efforts paid off in a fish.

  “It’s just as much fun as fishing,” he claimed. “It doesn’t matter which of us happens to be holding the rod. Either way, I feel like an equal participant. It’s not me or you casting the fly and hooking the fish. It’s us.”

  “Fishing in your imagination,” I said. “Virtual angling.”

  “Well, sure,” he said. “Once you’ve packed away some experiences, it doesn’t take much to roll out the mental home movies and to spark the muscle memories. When I see you holding a bending rod, I can feel it. When I watch you cast, the part of my brain that guides my casting arm is doing it along with you.”

  When he became too infirm to go fishing, my father insisted that I narrate detailed reports of all my angling adventures, great and small. He liked to hear about a summer evening on my local bluegill pond just as much as a week on an Alaskan salmon river. He’d close his eyes when I talked, and if I skimmed over some detail, he’d interrupt me. He wanted to know how the river smelled, how the breeze riffled the water, how the trout sipped the mayfly spinners, how the mist rose off the stream.

  And if I did it right, I could tell that he was feeling and smelling and hearing and seeing it all for himself.

  I used to think my father was odd. Who else would truly enjoy watching somebody else fish as much as he enjoyed fishing himself? How could a man who knew he’d never go fishing again genuinely love hearing other people’s stories the way Dad did?

  Well, we’re all virtual anglers. We daydream of fish and rivers and hatches when we tie flies, when we take showers, when we drive automobiles. We join clubs and watch videos and attend shows
. We devour catalogs and pamphlets. We hang around fly shops. We buy lots of stuff. We read magazines.

  I know for a fact that you read books about fishing.

  * * *

  In the last months of his life, when I visited him, I usually found my father lying in his sickbed with his eyes closed and a little smile on his face. I’d sit beside him, poke his shoulder, and say, “Hey. You awake?”

  His eyes would blink open. “I was fishing,” he’d say.

  * * *

  As the kid and I watched from the bridge, that nice brown trout eased into the current seam, drifted backward, humped his back, twisted his head, and ate something.

  “See that?” the kid said. “Too bad you don’t have a pole with you.”

  “I’ve got a rod in my car,” I said. “I don’t go anywhere without my gear.”

  “So whyn’t you go catch that fish, then?”

  I tapped my temple and smiled. “Because I already did.”

  He narrowed his eyes at me. “Huh?”

  “Virtual angling,” I said.

  2

  Trickle Treat

  After living most of my life within earshot of highway racket where city lights blotted the stars from the night sky, I finally did it. I bought a little farm on a dirt road in the New Hampshire hills. My new hometown has a post office, a cash market, a library, and an inn that has sheltered wayfarers since 1789. There’s a sheep farm and an apple orchard and a couple of cornfields. That’s about it for commerce.

  Our town dump is officially called “The Dump.” It’s that kind of a town.

  My neighbors own fly rods and shotguns and canoes. They raise goats and pigs and chickens. They park backhoes and tractors and pickup trucks in their barns. They read books and debate foreign policy and drive long distances for good theater and first-run movies and veal piccata, too, and they send their kids to college.

  That kind of town.

  In my new town, stone walls line every roadside. Old cellarholes are scattered through the woods. From my windows I can watch whitetail deer, wild turkeys, ruffed grouse, red foxes, black bears, and packs of coyotes hunt and browse in my fields. Barred owls and sharpshin hawks sometimes come swooping down to chase the chickadees from my feeders.