HOT FLIES AND WOOLY BUGGERS

A cartoon plays in my head while I sleep. I’m on the bank of a flowing river, getting ready to cast my line into the water. I snap the line back, the hook snags the back of my trousers and the trousers, being break-away (in my dream), tear away from my body and wind up hanging over the river on my rod. My first cast and all I catch is…..me.

I’ve been ‘fixing to get ready to learn’ fly fishing (as my friend Peg from Northern Florida would call it) for some time. I have certain trepidations about learning to fly fish. I like the idea of fishing – it’s a calm sport until you get a big one on the line and then it’s all muscle and a measure of finesse. I like being outside and I like eating fish. So just what is my hang-up?

When my friend Craig came up to Yellowstone for the weekend we went fishing on Yellowstone Lake but that was ‘trolling’ – throwing a line out the back of a comfortable boat specifically set up for fishing, letting the brightly colored lure called a ‘slider’ sink 50 feet and then just waiting for a fat Lake or elegant Cutthroat to grab onto it. We both caught two Lake trout, which since they are not only invasive but predatory, you have to kill – period. Park regulations. That meant even though we rather desperately wanted to catch our own dinner it felt righteous instead of bloodthirsty.

Once we reeled the fish in, our guide Lindsey netted the big ones (about 3 pounds she said), pulled them into the boat and into a bucket, then reset the line after which the fish in the bucket met their Maker.  Lindsey grabbed a pair of long-nose pliers and whacked them smartly on the head. Most of the time, only one whack was enough to send the fish into the Great River in the Sky.

There was blood, of course. Especially when Lindsey proceeded to gut the fish, part of her job description of being a fishing guide on Yellowstone Lake.  Aha! That’s the trepidation.  Killing something.  I don’t even kill flies or scorpions most of the time. I leave rattlers to their own business. I’m a certified pacifist. So why the heck would I want to fish only to have to kill the fish? I’m still trying to figure that out.

One way I overcome my trepidations is to wallow in my discomfort. I got over (somewhat) my fear of heights by learning to rappel. Now I needed to get over my discomfort over killing an living thing. I eat meat. I don’t eat a lot of beef for very good reasons (I watched Food, Inc.), but I do eat elk, and bison, and fish. Lots of fish. I think it’s only fair to the fish if I understand how they come to my table. And certainly, fishing for my own dinner is better than eating fish caught by drift-netting. Better for me, better for the kingdom of fish.

My son believes that everyone should have the experience, like we once did, of knowing what it’s like to grow or kill our own food. He says we’d all eat a lot differently. Mind you, he’s a locavore. My family raised chickens once. You can't get more local than that. Now that I think about it, actually it was my older sister who raised chickens- for a 4H project. My Mom and Dad tried to help her kill some when it was time, instructing me to take my little brother up in the front yard where he couldn’t enjoy the blood and gore. I think they managed to kill about four of them before they realized they could pay someone to do that. My little brother and I are the only family members that ate chicken for the next 6 months.

Back to the fish. Besides feeling hypocritical about not wanting to kill what I obviously enjoy eating, I figure fishing is another way to enjoy this beautiful outdoors we have been so generously given. Fly fishing turns out to be pretty easy, really. It’s catching the wily fish that turns out to be way more difficult.

I am taking baby steps to learn to fish.  First, I accepted the gift of an abandoned rod and reel from a co-worker. Then I went up to Bozeman to see my nephew during a fly fishing weekend here in Montana with Warriors and Quiet Waters (see my post on that). Mikey is full of fishing suggestions and checked my abandoned rod pronouncing it useful for learning. Then I talked about learning for several weeks. This is an important step – it makes you look and feel like a weenie if you don’t follow through.

Last week, I talked to our resident fly fishing expert named…..well….let’s call him Wiley….who happens to be a co-worker who fishes EVERY SINGLE DAY OF THE YEAR. Yes, I too find that amazing. Anyway, he gave me some tips on what flies to get (he said make sure to ask the angler shop for ‘hot flies and woolly buggers’) and again, approved my rod and reel for learning purposes.  Last Saturday, I took myself down to the fly shop and bought some nymphs (little teeny things), woolly buggers (so pretty you could turn them into earrings) and hoppers. Grasshoppers are a popular dinner with the fish right now and flies are tied to look like ‘hoppers’.

The next obvious step is to learn to tie the hook on to the line. I figured a square knot would do. I’m pretty good at square knots. But, oh no, there are special knots for fly fishing. (I’m pretty sure they do this to separate the wheat from the chaff.)  The one I needed to learn was the Improved Clinch Knot. It couldn’t just be a clinch knot; it had to be an IMPROVED Clinch Knot. Double tricky. I tried it (I think I cheated just a teeny bit on the number of twists) and it looked about as well done as the cakes I bake. Wiley took a yank on it and the hook fell right off the line. Point made, Master.

So I spent lunchtime learning to tie the Improved Clinch Knot. Got pretty good at it. Not so good as to be able to tie it in the dark (which Master Wiley had suggested should be the ultimate goal) but good enough for the hook to stay on the line.

Now it was time for the BIG TIME. I asked a friend to go down with me to a section of the Gardner River where she could hang out and watch me fly fish – or try to fly fish – or at least practice casting my fly in the general direction I wanted it to go. But guess what? Fly fishing isn’t really all about the fish; that’s the first lesson of fly fishing. It’s about a whole host of things.

Like learning the water. Water has a mind of its own. It twists and weaves down the watercourse in ways that have to be observed to be understood. A good fisher can sense the water, where it forms deep pools where fish hide out, where it goes too fast for the fish to be concerned about eating. After learning what flies you might need and practicing knotting them onto the fly line, watching your fly and line move through the water is one of the first assignments for Fly Fishing 101. At least I think it is. Since I’m making this up as I go along I get to figure out the syllabus.

The next lesson is to learn how to cast in a way that productively gets the fly into the water where you want it to go. I finally figured out that if you want to make your line longer, you can’t do it in one fell swoop – or at least with my serviceable for learning fly rod. I had to cast and then pull some line out, then cast again several times until the weight of the tiny nymph fly finally pulled the line out. At some point I got cocky enough to ‘call the pocket’ which in billiard terms means I told my friend where I was going to place my fly. And it worked. Until the wind picked up.

That’s the next lesson –  or at least part of the casting lesson - how to figure the wind into the accuracy of your cast. Pretty soon the wind picked up so much I wasn’t really making productive casts so I decided to give it one last go before reeling in my line and hiking back to my truck. Casting is pulling back every so slightly on your rod to the clock position ‘2’ then moving the rod (and the line) straight forward (mostly) to the clock position ‘10’. So I sent my rod back and promptly caught….a thistle. My backcast sent my tiny nymph right into a thistle pod in the middle of thistly, bristly leaves. I spent a good bit of time trying to figure out how to pull my hook away from the thistle without getting pricked but it was obvious I was going to have to perform surgery to remove it.

At this point, some lovely European men in full fly fishing gear came to my rescue. One of them kindly removed the hook from the thistle and then they left – rather urgently no doubt to discuss these silly American women who come out to cast and catch a thistle. Well, I didn’t see them with all their really expensive stuff catch anything either. So there. Nonetheless, if you have to be rescued, it is very nice to be rescued by a tall, good-looking European man with smiling eyes. Even if you are the reason for the smiles.

So back to the curriculum.  On my first try, I only practiced with the one nymph.  I’m thinking the next lesson is to try casting with different flies, which I now have courtesy of the Parks Angler Shop in Gardiner and my friend Master Fisherman Wiley. This means practicing the dreaded Improved Clinch Knot over and over and over as I exchange one fly for another. 

I promise to tell you all about Wiley in one of my next posts but suffice to say Wiley is an incredibly devoted fisherman. Wiley only fishes with flies he has tied himself in Yellowstone. He tells me that the fish in Yellowstone are so different, so wonderful and so sacred that to fish with anything else is pretty much a sacrilege. OK. I get that but I am so happy he gave me a box of flies he no longer needs because HE DID NOT TIE THEM. I am more sacrilegious than Wiley is about fish. Oh, he also warned me not to swear because the fish might hear. More about that, and Wiley, in a later post.

This weekend I am backpacking into Shoshone Lake here in the Park. I intend to take my rod and flies with me and spend some time casting in the Lake. Wiley says it will be very different than casting in the River. He suggests I use Woolly Buggers and Hoppers for this.  I might even try tying some tiny little weights onto the flies to get them further down into the water. Fishing rumor has it that the fish are running deep these days - keeping out of the warm waters toward the top.

In the meantime, I have been perusing fly fishing sites.  If I find anything interesting, I’ll let you know. I already know I’ll be writing about the lexicon of fly fishing. I’ll also be letting you know anything else I learn about fish, nature, water or anything else I pick up from throwing a line into the water in the hopes of someday catching something besides a thistle. But with my lack of skill, at this moment the best summary I can give you is that fly fishing has been a bit thorny to date but I'm sticking with it.