FLY FISHING FINESSE
by Joel Vance, Humor Editor
Fly fishing and I have maintained a strange dog attitude for many years. Mostly I fish for bluegills, barroom brawlers who don't appreciate, nor necessarily even respond to finesse.
If you drop a fly so it doesn't even ripple the surface film, a bluegill is likely not to notice it for a week or so. Bluegills are like the old story about the fellow whapping a mule between the eyes with a two-by-four.
"What did you do that for?" asked a friend.
"Well, first you gotta get their attention," says the whapper.
Bluegills like to see food hit the water the way a waitress in a diner slaps a 16-ounce sirloin on the table in front of a trucker:
"Here you go, honey. Wrap your gums around that!"
A trout, on the other hand, is like someone carrying a sack inscribed "Lots of Money" walking through the warehouse district after dark. Trout suspect with good cause that anglers mean them harm. If a bluegill is Mortimer Snerd, then a trout is Charlie McCarthy.
I don't want my prey species to be that wary. I like a nice dumb fish that ambles along like Clem Kadiddlehopper, muttering, "Doo de doo, hey, what's that big noise like something fell in the water? Looks like a big bunch of feathers tied on a hook, but maybe it could be a fat juicy bug. I'll bet it's a juicy bug. Reckon I'll swallow it and find out." I tried fly tying for a while and proved as ham-fisted at that as I was at casting. Anyone can tie a bluegill fly, but trout prefer delicate imitations of mayflies.
Mayflies are grandly pathetic. They are doomed to ephemeral life because they have no mouth and cannot eat to sustain themselves. They are born to do one thing: breed and thus reproduce. They are ecological carbon paper.
Most live a day which may be an eternity in mayfly time. I'm sure they don't waste what little time they have wondering what a chicken sandwich tastes like. But whatever a mayfly's problems, they're simple compared to those of the fly fisherperson who is trying to imitate the insect. A mayfly just needs to worry about love and death; the angler must worry about making a chicken look like an insect. Col. Sanders couldn't do it.
I'd almost given up on finesse in fly fishing until I went to England a few years back. I was on a small stream in Wales, working my way upstream. There was one other angler and I passed him as I flailed fruitlessly at the sleepy water. I tried a combination of every fly I had (four, I believe). I double-hauled and roll-cast and side armed and did everything else I'd learned over the years. Sometimes I even didn't snag a tree.
That night, in the lodge dining room, my fellow angler of the afternoon approached. He was a classic Scot, spare and frosty of eyebrow, face weathered from a thousand afternoons on the trout stream.
If you designed the quintessential trout angler of the bamboo rod era, he would be your model.
He gave me a spare smile, the approbation of one old expert to another, and said, "Ye cast a gud line, laddie." I felt ten feet tall.
Except that when I had seen him, he was fishing with worms for eels.
There is a moral here somewhere....
