The August days are all haze now. Driving in the valley, the mountains are invisible and the low sun of afternoon is a dull nuclear peach color through the thick humidity. I did not fish this week or today because of the starting of the fall semester of the university, but tonight I visited with Benson and Jim (Mad Dog) Kilgo. (His nickname arose in my hyperbolic inversion of his near infinite patience in doing one thing carefully and in never rushing the telling of a good story.) Kilgo was just back from a week in Montana hiking and fishing in the park, and we needed to give him the space to sing his song at the campfire of the red gods. That is, we needed to have a serious talk of mountains and rivers and fish ritually saluted by good bourbon. He had brought with him a wonderful panorama of photographs taken from the front porch of the ranger station at Slough Creek and pictures of cutthroats caught by his son. Jim said most of their fishing had been off due to muddy waters caused by storms and rains over last yearÕs burned areas. And as we got into the spirit of the talk the three of us began to speculate about the possibility of a week in Yellowstone based out of Roosevelt Lodge. WeÕll see. ThatÕs how good trips sometimes begin.
It would be an interesting trip to include this threesome. Jim has an almost Yankee dedication to the dry fly as the classic form of fly fishing, and he is awfully fond of the idea of #18 hooks. Benson and I are scattergun opportunists: we fish to rising trout when we see them and we fish what works. Sometimes it is a dry fly. More often than not it is a Zug Bug or a Wooly Bugger. Jim thought our style may be just a peculiarity of conditions on the Elk, but I donÕt think so. Nymphs and streamers work, and they work because they place the fly where the fish feed most of the time. Jim admits that he finds nymph fishing very frustrating. I thought of it that way at first: it seemed an entirely hit or miss but mostly miss kind of fishing. It took a long time but I learned that good nymph fishingÑor generic wet fly fishingÑrequires a careful reading of the water. It means watching rising fish to determine stations, but if there are no rises, it means watching the water: every bit of the water. The main currents, the bends, turns, and especially the eddies where currents mix or where slack water edges faster water. And it means watching the surface film and every nuance of light and passing flotsam to detect the flow.
Wading the other day at GarnerÕs Ford, I discovered a pocket that held a trout when I noticed the difference in the reflected light coming off the downstream side of a submerged grass mound. It showed me the double reverse current coming into the pocket from each side. The only clue was in the pattern of reflection. I took a trout in that pocket, by the slow drift of a Zug Bug dead on center of the grass mound, sweeping out around one side and then pulled into the pocket downstream. The trout hit just as it swept into the pocket and began to be pulled down. A year ago I might have missed this fish by casting only to rising fish or to fish that I could see in the water. I have also had to learn that there are usually a lot more fish active in the river than are rising or can be seen. When I nymph fish now, I donÕt fish the water; I fish the lies. It is not a random scattering of flies on the water even if it is not directed to a rise.
Nymphing is more an act of faith, though, than fishing by sight to a rise. In nymphing you have to believe in your knowledge of the water and of the fishÑand in your fly selection and technique. You have to pay particular attention to the smallest variations in line drift and to subtle ÒbumpsÓ that are hardly distinguishable sometimes from turbulence in the current. Pauses and bumps are usually fish. In nymph fishing, when I have not been paying attention, I have sometimes found I had a fish on that I had not detected until I started to lift my line for the next cast. Nymphing is not less legitimate than dry fly fishing; it is different, requiring its own special adaptation of flyfishing skills. Sometimes I have used my nymphing knowledge to fish dry and have taken fish by correctly diagnosing a good lieÑparticularly in the snag-filled edge troughs on the ElkÑby carefully reading the light on the water.
The secret to any form of trout fishing, however, is in reading the water. Probably one of the best-ever books on flyfishing is the old Derrydale Press volume of Eugene ConnettÕs Fishing a Trout Stream. It is a collection of black-and-white photographs of lies and water patterns and ConnettÕs commentary on where to find trout in each kind of water. Old, old-fashioned, out-of-date and all, it is still the one trout fishing book I read the most. Haig-Brown is a help too. I read with pleasure and with a sense of angling brotherhood his confession of his love of moving water, running water, and of the hours he spent lying beside little streams watching tiny sticks float and swirl on the small currents. I do the same thing: watching, always watching, pondering, studying the swirls and shadows and ripples. It is both surveillance and vigil. If I have had some luck with nymphs it is because I have watched the water. Some rainy days that have been less good for fishing have still been good for learning the water because the muddy waters often show the currents and reverse flows better. People have even asked me, ÒWhy are you taking a picture of muddy water?Ó I usually just say, ÒIt has an interesting color.Ó Those pictures turn into maps and diagrams in my notebooks and then into tactics for the next round of fishing.
As we continued our warming salute to the red gods, JimÕs insistence that the dry fly was the classic form of fly fishing surprised me. He sounded more like he had wet his first flies on northern streams instead of his home waters in the upland South. Under certain circumstances the dry fly may be a difficult kind of fishingÑI am thinking of the very large trout in still pools of very clear waterÑbut it is not the original, nor the only form of flyfishing. Yet, under a different set of circumstancesÑtwelve feet of water in a turn hole snag with a big brown on the bottomÑthe nymph or streamer is just as challenging. From what I can tell from my reading of Walton, the pre-Walton anglers, and of the 18th and 19th Century anglers, the bulk of this early fishing was with ÒwetÓ flies, flies that absorbed water and then drifted with the current. The dry fly, particularly fished upstream, in England and America is a relatively late refinement for special circumstances. These circumstances were as much social and cultural circumstances of the anglers as of the needs of angling itself. To these anglers the dry is interesting in its own way and that interest has its own integrity. Dry fly fishing is what it is. It is not Òbetter.Ó Other circumstances and other anglers lead to other stylesÑalso with their own integrity. But in trout fishing I am, within broad ethical limits (i.e., no bait), going to do what works to catch trout whether it be dries, nymphs, or streamers. The point after all is to imitate trout food, not to imitate Yankees.
Gerald L. Smith
Sewanee, TN