A Flyfisher’s Life
As a professional fly fisherman, my life style has proved a lot of envy from my frie nds. “Gosh,” they say, “it must be wonderful to spend all of your time fishing, hanging around tackel shops, speaking to fly fishing clubs and things like that! I wish that I could give up my job and be like you. I’ll bet you have had a great time, how did you do it?”
Yes, it has been been a lot of fun, but it hasn’t always been easy and contrary to popoular belief, I wasn’t born with a fly rod in my hand. That came some time later, perhaps at about the age of ten.
I can still remember that day, our family was returning from a camping vacation in either Maine or perhaps it was New Hampshire. The day was crisp and cool, the automn leaves of red and gold were beginning to fall, fluttering to earth in the gentle breeze.
As my dad drove down the narrow, twisting macadam road that paralleled the rock brook, we came to a little rest stop with a lone picnic table where the meandering waterway emptied into a small, crystal clear mountain lake.
As my mother unpacked the picnic lunch, fishing rod in hand I explored the shoreline with my dog Dusky a large black and while collie, looking for frogs, snakes, other creepy crawlers and of course fish!
As we progressed along the shore not having much success at last we came to an old couple in a rowboat. Well, they seemed old to a ten year old kid, I guess they were at least 30!. They were fishing perhaps 50 to 100 feet from shore and between puffs on his pipe the old man would take several strokes with his oars then carfully, silently use them to brake the rowboats forward momentum.
Rhythmically and smoothly his wife would extend the heavy fly line, false casting with the long, delicate brown bamboo wand. Four, five, perhaps six casts she would make, each a few feet longer than the previous until at last the fly would hover just above the point she thought a fish might lie. Then she would stop, the fly line would unroll and the fly would alight like a thistle down on the placid mirrored inverted image of the mountains.
Two, maybe three casts she would make from that positon then her husband would take a few more strokes and once again ship the oars. Then they would repeat the scenario.
As I watched that little tuft of feathers float lazily upon the still water, a tiny dimple appeared on the surface and the fly was gone. A secondsdelay and the lady lifted her rod tip to set the hook and the delicate wisp of bamboo arched and danced gracefully as she stripped in the slack line. The little multi hued brook trout dodged to the right, to the left and splashed about on the surface scattering the reflection of the nearby mountians and the clouds. The struggle continued for a couple of minutes as the lady angler alternately gave and took line. A few minutes later her husband deftly slid the landing net into the water and the lady led the brilliant little fish to the net and then it was in the boat.
Excitedly I ran back to the picnic table and began babbling to my parents as only a ten year old boy could do about a twelve inch fish!
My father was really not much of a fisherman at the time, but he explained a little about fly fishing to me and he tied a fly on my line that one of his friends had tied for me.
I spent the better part of the next hour in a fruitless attempt to imitate the fly casting of that lady angler with my tubular steel telescoping rod. As was that little twenlve inch trout on the end of that lady angler’s line, I too was hooked on fly fishing!
On the rest of the trip home to Rhode Island where we were living at the time I continued my excited babble about what I had witnessed on that little lake. Finally I just couldn’t contain myself any longer. “Dad,” I blurted out, “I need a fly rod!” My dad didn’t even shift his gaze off the crowned blacktop road ahead of the fifty five Nash Ambassador as he replied, “You already have A fishing rod.”
Undaunted, I turned as any bright red blooded outdoor American boy would do and said to my mother, “Mom, I need a fly rod!” As usual such attempts to circumvent the decisions of my fatheer were met with the logical answer of, “You already have A fishing rod!”
Even at the tender age of ten I was mature enough to know that responses such as “But dad, you already have A power saw” or “Mom, you already have A pair of shoes,” would not elicit the sympathy needed to change their minds. So, for most of the rest of the time home I contented myself with playing with little tufts of my collie’s hair, some loose threads of the car’s upholster and some feathers I had foundin the woods and thinking about how they could be made into something useful, like say, a fishing lure! I continued to daydream as my father drove.
When we got home, much of the rest of thatfall was spent collecting anything which remotely looked as though it could be used for tying flies. No dog nor cat in theneighborhood was safe from my scissors until school started , nor were my parents safe from that relentless delcaration, “I need a fly rod!”
As time progressed I began to tie some flies that probably could have deceived some intellectionally challenged finny denizen of the brook. (actually we weren’t politically correct yet and in those days just called them dumb fish). Still it was like some third world nation having a nuclear weapon and no missle to deliver it. I still needed that dang fly rod!
Was it my relentless hounding of my parents or their realization that I was really serious about thatblanket response to “You already have A fly rod.” I’ll never know, but true to parents typical resistance to admitting that they might have been wrong about something like this, my father made a minor concession and said something like this: “If you can earn half of the money for a fly rod, we’ll pay for the other half of it.” I can just imagine what he was probably thinking at the time, “This should be the end of this nonsense.” You’ve heard about not tempting fate?
So now my time was now divided between school, fishing, tying flies and anything I had to do to get a few pennies to put in the jar for my “fly rod fund.” Anything I could do, I did; collecting deposit bottles, paper drives with my little red wagon, cutting lawns, weeding gardens, shovelig sidewalk, even picking flowers from my mother’s gardens and selling bouquets to little old ladies around the neighborhood. Everything else took second place to my driven entrepreneurship.
I took to walking home from school instead of taking the bus so that I could drool over the fly rods at the G&M Sports Center even though it made the walk a bit farther. In any case it was good practive for those later hike in fishing trips. I made fast friends with some of the older anglers who frequented the shop and they encouraged my fly tying. They even talked Mr. Soderlund (aka “Speck”) into buyingsome flies from me for the store by telling him that they would buy them from him if he would buy them from me!
In the spring I surprised my dad one Saturday when I announced that I at last had half of the $37.50 for that little 6’ 8” HEH fly rod on the rack in the sports shop.
As stubborn as my dad could be about sticking to something as ridiculous as, “You already have A fly rod,” he was equally strict about sticking to his word and later that day I found myself in the front yard trying to figure out how to use the darn thing! (Yes, he sprung for the reel and the line). I quickly found out that the art of fly casting wasn’t quite as easy as that old lady made it look!
Paul Saisslin, one of my dads friends at work who dabbled in fishing (at the time I probably thought he taught Ted Trueblood to fish!) gave me a few pointers on fly casting but it didn’t help much. I went to the East Providence Library within walking distance from your home in Rumford, but the only book they had on fly fishing was Vince Marinaro’s “A Modern Dry Fly Code,” a fly pattern book that had nothing to do with casting. Nobody had ever checked out the book before or after me, such was the lack of local interest in fly fishing at that time.
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It was now that those long walks home from school and stopping by the sports shop paid off and here and there I got a few lessons from Speck and some of the other anglers who frequented the shop.
One of these was another “ancient” man, a Prudential life insurance man of maybe 25 or 30 named Bruce Johnson. Bruce took me under his wing and introducted me to some of the tactics of trout fishing. Up to this time my fly fishing had been confined to flipping a crude fly in front of a bluegill or yellow perch some fifteen or twenty feet away at Lincoln Woods or in the East Providence Reservoir on the Ten Mile River a few blocks from our house.
Btuce explained the importance of approaching a fish from downstream as the fish always faced up current and countln’t see you, the importance of a drag free float, matching the hatch and other fly fishing trivia. We fished all over Rhode Island in that little green VW bug and a learned a lot from that “old man!” and I wish I had known more about those “old people” in the row boat!
