Trout Eyes Read online

  He never used a bobbin. He stripped off a few feet of tying silk, ran it through his ball of beeswax, and used a half-hitch to secure the thread after every operation. He spread a dish towel on his lap to collect the trimmings, and after a session at the bench, he folded up the towel, went out to the back porch, and flapped the clippings onto the snow. “The birds will find it when the snow melts,” he said. “They’ll use it for their nests.”

  He was right. Come spring, I liked to wander around the yard looking for the bird nests. Usually they had strands of yellow chenille and silver tinsel and scraps of bucktail and feathers woven into them.

  My father supplied his non-tying friends with flies, and since he had many friends, every winter he tied tens of dozens of flies—flies for every angling occasion, flies that his friends requested, flies for his friends’ friends. Nobody paid him, nor did he want them to. They gave him back in companionship what he gave them in flies.

  For a while in the early 1940s he tied commercially. “Three for a dollar was the going rate,” he once told me. “It was a hard way to make money, and I didn’t do it for very long. My problem was, I’m a perfectionist. I refused to sell a fly with any flaw, even if no one would notice it except me. But I learned a lot about fly tying that way, and I ended up with an awful lot of flawed flies. They all caught fish.”

  Dad considered fly tying to be a manufacturing process. But to me, what he did was an art, and the pieces he created were beautiful—perfectly symmetrical and proportioned, smoothly tapered, subtly colored. When I watched him, he made it look easy.

  As the winter nights passed, his boxes filled with flies. When I was a kid, there were very few evenings when Dad didn’t put in an hour or two at the vise.

  And if I sat there quietly and waited long enough, he’d eventually pat his knee and invite me to climb up and tie a fly of my own. I’m positive I was the only kid in my first-grade class who could roll a woodduck wing and wind a hackle feather and make a whip-finish.

  My flies never looked like Dad’s, as hard as I tried. The wings always flared out at odd angles, and the heads came out big and lumpy. But, when I finished my evening’s fly and took it from the vise and handed it to my father, he always held it up, squinted at it, poked it with his finger, and then handed it back to me. “Yup,” he always said. “This one’ll catch fish, all right.”

  Through the months of the fly-tying season, my own little box of flies slowly filled, and when the fishing season arrived, I tried them and discovered that Dad was right: As flawed and amateurish and outlandishly designed as my creations were, they did catch fish.

  I gradually figured out that anything would catch fish if you tied it on and kept it in the water long enough, a principle that continues to guide my fly-fishing strategies to this day.

  * * *

  My father tied flies for his friends and for his own entertainment well into his eighties, even after he’d grown too lame and wobbly to wade a stream or paddle a canoe.

  Then came the day when he bequeathed what was left of his fly-tying materials to me. “Take it all,” he said, waving the back of his hand at the old green breadbox. “I can’t use it anymore.”

  “You sure?” I said.

  He held up his gnarled, arthritic fingers and shrugged.

  I knelt down and opened the breadbox. I rummaged through the bags and boxes and envelopes and found junglecock and golden pheasant and peacock, tinsel and chenille and floss, blue-dun and ginger and grizzly necks. I sniffed the mothballscented deerhair and hare’s mask and bucktail. It was hard to imagine my father not tying flies.

  * * *

  The summer she turned seven, I paddled along the shoreline of a Maine bass pond while Sarah, in the bow seat, trolled, gripping her fiberglass fly rod in both hands.

  When the fish struck and her rod bent, she squealed.

  I landed the foot-long smallmouth with the gaudy fly in its mouth and held it up for her to see. “She ate your Pink Sarah,” I said. “I told you it would catch a fish.”

  Sarah smiled. “I really didn’t believe you.”

  “You should always believe your daddy,” I said.

  12

  The X Factor

  On a Friday in mid-July Marshall Dickman and I waded the Farmington River in north-central Connecticut. It took us a while to figure out that the trout in the Church Pool were sipping tiny olive spinners. I mean, these bugs were minuscule. About size 28. I found a few 26s in my box, but I couldn’t poke my 6X tippet through the eye of the hook. I had to step down to 7X to tie on the fly.

  Most of those foot-long brown trout squinted at my offering and proclaimed the fly too big and the tippet too coarse. A helpful Farmington regular I talked with in the parking lot afterwards told me you really needed to go down to 8X for these fish.

  A few days and about 1500 miles later, I found myself drifting on a glassy lake in the wilds of Labrador casting a size 8 brown drake spinner knotted to a 2X tippet into the paths of some cruising six-pound brook trout and Arctic char. Caught a couple of them, too. The guide said a lot of his clients used 0X, and as far as he could tell, it didn’t bother the fish.

  From 7X to 2X in consecutive trout-fishing days. It got me to thinking about tippets.

  * * *

  As far as I know, I never fished with tippets made from silkworm gut, although gut tippets were still being used in my earliest angling days. I didn’t pay much attention to what my father tied onto the end of my line when I first went fishing with him.

  Over 50 years ago, when I began setting forth on my own for an afternoon of trout fishing, I carried a couple packets of nylon tippets in my vest. Not spools of material, but glassine envelopes containing separate coils of tippet. Each tippet was about sixteen inches long.

  The post-war nylon tippets were not radically different from what anglers accustomed to gut expected. They were short, kinky, and weak. Pre-cut lengths of nylon stubbornly retained their springy coils when removed from their packets. Gut tippets had to be softened by soaking in water before they could be used and had been limited in their length by the capacity of the silkworm. The new synthetic stuff broke quite easily, too.

  Back then, I changed or added tippet as infrequently as possible, mainly because tying blood knots challenged me. By the end of the day, after a normal number of bust-offs and fly changes, I might have a three-inch stub of tippet left. If it was long enough to tie a fly to, as far as I was concerned, it was long enough.

  The Surgeon’s Knot revolutionized fly fishing for me.

  In those early days of synthetics, nylon leader tippets—even those from the same packet—varied wildly in their strength. The strongest of them wasn’t very strong. Generally I never tied on anything finer than 3X. “Going down to 4X” was a radical move reserved for extraordinary situations.

  Some fishermen liked to brag about “going down to 4X,” as if the mere act of tying on such risky material was a sign of their superior expertise. It always seemed to me that “going down to 4X” was pretty much an affectation.

  It’s possible that my present aversion to 7- and 8X tippets derives from my fear that people will think I’m showing off.

  Back then, I don’t believe they even manufactured tippets thinner than 4X. I never heard anyone boast about “going down to 5X.”

  I caught plenty of trout on 3X. Busted some off, too. Nowadays, I rarely fish dry flies on anything thicker than 4X. It’s tempting to think that today’s trout are smarter and spookier and endowed with better eyesight than those of my youth, but I doubt it. Most of the trout we catch in New England waters these days were born in hatcheries, just as they were 50 years ago.

  Maybe back then I got away with coarse tippets (by today’s standards) because our main New England mayfly hatches—Hendricksons, Light Cahills, Quill Gordons, March Browns, Green and Brown Drakes—are large bugs, none smaller than Size 14. You still need 3X for these big flies.

  The optimum tippet size is determined by the size of the fly, n
ot the wariness of the trout. Flies tied on big hooks need thick tippet to turn them over, while you can thread only slender tippets through the eyes of tiny flies.

  There’s a mathematical rule for it called “The Rule of Four.” Divide the hook size by four to get the optimum tippet size (or multiply the tippet size by four to get the fly size, although I can’t think of an instance where you’d do it that way). So if you need to tie on a size 16 parachute Adams to match the bugs that are on the water, 16 divided by 4 tells you that you should be using a 4X tippet.

  A 3X tippet is just right for a Size 12 March Brown. For a Size 8 Eastern Green Drake, use 2X.

  For little flies—size 18 and smaller—tippet size isn’t crucial. I use 5- or 6X interchangeably, and 7X reluctantly.

  You don’t reduce drag or fool sharp-eyed trout by “going down to” finer tippets. You do it be lengthening them. Follow the Rule of Four to determine the proper tippet size. To combat drag, tie on four or five feet of it.

  I suspect that fifty years ago we ignored, or were unaware of, olives and sulfurs and tricos, not to mention jassids and beetles and ants—the tiny mayflies and terrestrials that, I assume, were eaten by trout back then just the way they are today—simply because tiny hooks and slender tippets were not widely available back then. A 3X tippet won’t fit through the 6X eye of a size 22 dry-fly hook, which probably discouraged manufacturers from producing hooks that small in the first place.

  The development of thin, strong tippet material made the mass production of tiny hooks feasible. The availability of small hooks, in turn, enabled anglers to “discover” tricos and bluewinged olives, midges and microcaddis, ants and jassids, and to tie flies to imitate them.

  * * *

  My father once explained to me that the “X” system of measuring the diameter of tippet material derived from the primitive method by which silkworm-gut tippets were made. A length of gut was shaped and slenderized by drawing it through a small round hole in a piece of metal. When the gut was pulled through the aperture one time, it was labeled 1X. Drawing it through a second time—2X—made it thinner, and so on.

  My father’s explanation was close to the truth, and satisfyingly unscientific, but not quite accurate. In fact, the gut was drawn through standardized apertures in metal plates used by jewelers. Each jeweler’s plate came with ten precisely-sized holes, which stepped down in diameter from .010 (1X) to .001 (10X) in increments of .001 inch. Perversely, the bigger the X-number, the smaller the hole.

  This produces the “Rule of Eleven” for converting tippet X size into diameter in thousandths of an inch: Subtract the X-number from eleven. So 6X tippet has a diameter of .005 inch.

  * * *

  Probably because of many bad experiences with that early material, it took me a while to learn to trust skinny tippets. 4X was about as light as I ever went, and even then, I felt a little showoffy about it.

  Several years ago, Harry Lane, who was guiding on the San Juan River in New Mexico, straightened me out. He told me that the best way to catch those muscular San Juan rainbows in October, when I was there, was to drift tiny (size 22 and 24) midge pupae on 6X tippets.

  I opined that that was a pretty flimsy tippet for such big fish.

  Harry grinned and took my rod. He tied three feet of 6X tippet (with a test weight of 3.5 pounds) to my leader and told me to hang onto the end of it. Then he stripped off a little line, backed up until the line and leader went taut, held the rod at a 45-degree angle, and said, “Okay, go ahead. Bust it.”

  I pulled and jerked and leaned my weight against the bend of the rod and the drag of the reel. I turned around and sprinted away. Harry “played” me expertly, and no matter how wildly I thrashed around, I could not break that tippet. I might not be as quick as a trout. But I’m bigger than most of them. It was an impressive exhibition of tippet strength, and since then I have felt confident fighting large fish aggressively on light tippets.

  A lot has changed in the past 50-odd years. But I still think going down to 8X is an affectation.

  13

  From Bobs to Bugs

  A LITTLE HISTORY

  “Bass-bugging,” wrote Ray Bergman, “is a type of fly-rod fishing that was born and raised right here in America. Considering that most fly fishing dates well back into English history, it’s a young sport, young enough that as a boy [Bergman was born in 1891] I was among the first to fish these big bugs in this way.”

  Actually, bass-bug fishing is the oldest method of catching fish on hook and line in North America. In 1741, when William Bartram described how Florida’s Seminole Indians fooled largemouth bass (which he called “trout”) with a “bob”, it’s likely he was reporting on an angling method that had been practiced for generations before the Europeans invaded the continent.

  “Two people are in a little canoe,” wrote Bartram, “one sitting in the stern to steer, and the other near the bow, having a rod ten or twelve feet in length, to one end of which is tied a string line, about twenty inches in length, to which is fastened three large hooks, back to back. These are fixed very securely, and tied with the white hair of a deer’s tail, shreds of a red garter, and some parti-colored feathers, all which form a tuft or tassel nearly as large as one’s fist, and entirely cover and conceal the hooks; that are called a “bob.” The steersman paddles softly, and proceeds slowly along shore; he now ingeniously swings the bob backwards and forwards, just above the surface and sometimes tips the water with it, when the unfortunate cheated trout [sic] instantly springs from under the reeds and seizes the exposed prey.”

  Today, when we cast our sleek spun-and-clipped deerhair bugs onto the water for bass, we are practicing an ancient and uniquely American technique that takes advantage of the bass’s aggressive surface-feeding habits . . . and one that predates the use of cork and wood to float the lures. Modern fly-rod bass bugs—and the methods by which they are fished—are mere refinements of angling with the primitive bob.

  Bass bugs have always been bass killers. It’s doubtful if the Seminoles were much interested in sport or artfulness. They needed fish to eat, and Everglades largemouths were their most available species. So if bob fishing hadn’t been an efficient way of capturing them, however much fun they had doing it, the Seminoles undoubtedly would’ve developed a deadlier method.

  By the middle of the nineteenth century, bob fishing had expanded northwards into North Carolina, whose natives refined the lure into something that resembled a modern deerhair bug. Dr. James A. Henshall—whose Book Of The Black Bass, published in 1881, was the very first devoted to the subject of bass fishing—described his own experience with bobs:

  “Happening to have a fish-hook in my pocket, I cut off a piece of the deer’s tail, and made a ‘bob.’ Then, cutting a long, slender pole, and tying the bob to the end with a piece of strong twine some three feet long, we got into the boat, my comrade paddling and I manipulating the bob. . . .

  “As my companion noiselessly paddled the boat along the fringe of rank grasses and luxuriant aquatic vegetation, I danced the bob along and over the water, now low, now high, and now dipping in the water—skimming, leaping and flying—till it seemed an uncanny thing. . . .

  “Several bass rose to it, and swirled at it, until one more active than the rest grabbed it by a vicious lunge, and the hook was firmly in his jaw.”

  In Flies (1950), J. Edson Leonard explained how the North Carolina bob had evolved into something resembling a bass bug. Bobs were made, he reported, from squares of deerskin (“preferably from the skin from the shin bones”), which were cured, cut into strips “about the width of a shoe string,” and soaked to make them pliable. “With the tail fastened on,” wrote Leonard, “there remains only to tie the body in place and fasten on the wings. Taper one edge of the strip and tie it to the shank. Wind the strip around the shank, fasten it with the working silk, tie on the wings, and the bug will be complete. The hair will project nearly at right angles to the body and will weave back and forth when the bug is
retrieved.”

  Whether Dr. Henshall actually invented the first bass bug made from spun and clipped deerhair, or whether the Henshall Bug was invented by somebody else and named after the father of American bass fishing, is uncertain. Leonard, for one, gives the doctor full credit. “Dr. James A. Henshall did more, perhaps, to exploit the first bass hair bugs than any other angler,” Leonard wrote. “He is credited with having made the original hair bug, one which bears his name to this day.” Others give the nod to Orley Tuttle, who concocted his Devil Bug in 1919.

  I do not propose to resolve this mystery. Ray Bergman, who fished with bass bugs before 1919, is no help. He describes his childhood bugs as “big, beautiful artificials made of cork, feathers, and deerhair,” but it’s unclear whether any of them was the Henshall deerhair type, with no cork ingredients. The fact that Henshall never described anything that resembles what we now know as the Henshall Bug in his 1881 book suggests that, if he did invent it, it happened sometime later. But we do know that the good doctor fished with bobs. At least in retrospect, spinning deerhair seems to be such a logical next step and obvious improvement over winding a strip of hairy deerskin around a hook shank that it’s easy to imagine Henshall, the consummate bass expert of his time, doing it. The Henshall Bug resembles a bob. It doesn’t look anything like a Devil Bug.

  The Henshall Bug features a tail of bucktail—white in the middle and a contrasting color on either side—flanked by splayed grizzly feathers. The body is built from flared and clipped natural deerhair, typically with a colorful stripe around its middle. The wings are fashioned from a bunch of bucktail tied in a downwing style over the clipped deerhair body and then divided and figure-eighted into position so that they stick out at right angles at the front of the hook. Most of our contemporary spun-and-clipped deerhair bugs are direct descendants of this design.