Month: June 2019

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The Wulff School of Fly Fishing, June 21-23, 2019

We matriculated at the Wulff School on a Friday evening, and graduated on the following Sunday. It was a quick education, and unlike high school I paid attention. Mostly. What they taught was useful, and even what I knew already it was good to hear again.

Here is the thing about the Wulff School: it has been on this earth for 40 years. It pre-dates trout hipsters. It pre-dates fly fishing for carp as a lifestyle choice and Euro-nymphing. It probably predates some parts of Europe. This is all trout all the time, and a trout fishing education of an older school. Sometimes the information is a bit idiosyncratic—that clinch knot variation and the water sock come to mind—but if you’re fishing for trout it’s stuff that will make your fishing better, or introduce you to fly fishing in an ordered and systematic way.

And it’s fun. There was no class bully. There was no prom. I declared myself class president and president of the National Honor Society and quarterback of the Joan Wulff Fighting Salmonids and nobody said no. Still, there was that anxiety that every school I’ve ever been to produces: Will I excel? Worse, will I embarrass myself? Well of course I will embarrass myself, but still . . . One worries about such things.

I suspect it was pretty much the same class I would have taken at the Wulff School in 2009, or 1999, or 1989. There were no Power Points, and laptops weren’t required. It was old school and it was charming. If Ms. Wulff started her school today it would be different, but I’m not sure that Power Points would add much.

There was plenty of hands-on stuff like knot tying and wading and casting. Then we cast some. Then we cast some more. Sometimes we didn’t go outside to cast, on Friday evening (after watching the 1969 Trout Unlimited video, The Way of the Trout) we practiced our grip and our power stroke with sawed off rods that consisted of the reel seat, the handle, and the first four or five inches of the butt section. Kris pointed out to me that there were no spells in these magic wands, then she had the nerve to shush me when I laughed out loud. I’m pretty sure she set me up to get in trouble with the teacher.

Did I mention we cast some? Joan Wulff made her bones as a caster and of course the most frustrating part of fly fishing is fly casting. Well, that and tangles. Tangles and putting down fish. Tangles and putting down fish and getting your waders filled with cold water and getting your back cast hung in the trees. But casting is right up there.

There were 22 of us in the class, and six instructors, and Ms. Wulff was around a lot to make seven. The students and instructors took class together, and we ate dinner together, and we hung out together. To practice casting—did I mention that we practiced casting?—we went out to the ponds in three groups and the instructors—all of whom were excellent—would watch us flail around and make encouraging and calm suggestions: Take your thumb to your temple, use your shoulder joint to bring down your elbow. Relax your shoulder. Relax your hand. Relax your shoulder. Relax your hand. Did I mention they told me to relax my shoulder? I think they discussed it in the teacher’s lounge: go by and tell the Thomas kid to relax his shoulder . . .

And why in Beelzebub’s tarnation are you casting sidearm? Ok, they didn’t say Beelzebub’s tarnation, they said if I didn’t stop casting sidearm my arm was going to fall off. Ok, they didn’t actually say that my arm would fall off, but that was what they would have said if they’d just thought of it. I started to tell them that I was 62 years old, and that if my arm hadn’t fallen off yet, it wasn’t going to because I tended to cast sidearm. I had come though to learn stuff, and even though I knew I was sloppy and lazy and could usually get done more or less what I wanted with my sloppy and lazy casts I could be a better caster if I just did what they told me to do.

The school director, Sheila Hassan, at one point had me shut my eyes and go through the motion of the cast on feel, just like Obi Wan and Luke. Then she said I was doing really well. And for that moment or two I really was. I felt the Force, Luke. However much I may have wanted to brand Ms. Wulff’s method as nit-picky and unrealistic, it was marvelously accurate, totally without my normal leftward slice of the leader and fly at the end of the cast. Normally I can cast a great slider. It’s just too bad the point isn’t to strike the fish out.

But with Ms. Wulff’s method, sidearm? Not happening! I was really feeling good, but then they filmed us on video and it all fell apart. Sorry Sheila. I know for about five seconds I was your star pupil.

I also fell apart any time Ms. Wulff watched me cast. Ms. Wulff is a handsome and active 92, engaged with her instructors and her students, and as demanding as the high school English teacher who made us read the Book of Job and Murder in the Cathedral the first week of class to get ready to start the Canterbury Tales. Why Job? I still don’t know. But like Mrs. Selman Ms. Wulff doesn’t accept laziness. She doesn’t accept sloppiness. I’m a bit surprised she didn’t rap my fingers with a magic wand.

Days later, fishing for pike in New Hampshire, throwing an eight weight with flies the size of baby ducklings, it occurred to me that I was concentrating. I wasn’t my usual lazy and sloppy self. I was following Ms. Wulff’s method and my casts on the river were both far enough and clean. I wished Ms. Wulff could have seen me, not like that time in class when she came up to watch me cast.

“Relax your shoulder,” she said. “Lift your arm up before it falls off.”

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Set Up. New York City, June 20-21, 2019.

The flight to New York left early, 5:40, and to get to the airport we sat the alarm for 3:30, which ain’t civilized. I called an Uber, and the driver was slow getting to us because of construction. That made us anxious and snappy, mostly at each other, but the driver got us to the airport in plenty of time notwithstanding our contradictory and confusing instructions. He was Nigerian perhaps, or Kenyan, African anyway, and not a talkative guy, but he was patient, and he got us there.

Leaving for ten days I worry about work, but it’s the time in my life when I should worry less about work and I’m trying. There are others who can worry for me.

As much as work I worry about leaving our dogs, the young stray Chihuahua and the old miniature schnauzer. Theoretically they are both Kris’s dogs, my dog having been the big golden who died last year, but the Chihuahua ends up sleeping by me and the schnauzer adores me. Who doesn’t appreciate adoration? I read once that leaving a short-lived dog without you is unkind, that you are its life and that its life is short, and the notion resonated. Our dogs travel with us from time to time, but they’re not fishing dogs, and the relatively yappy small dogs aren’t dogs to leave alone in a hotel while we fish. 

We chose this Northeast swing in part to see the Astros play the Yankees. For a few years we’ve tried to catch an out-of-town game a season, and we hadn’t been to the new Yankee stadium. The Astros are good this year, but there are lots of injuries, Altuve, Springer, Correa, McHugh, and they’re coming off their first four-game losing streak. Everyone’s favorite player, Jose Altuve—who doesn’t like Jose Altuve?—is having a poor season and is just back off the IL, which until this season was the DL, and which I think stands for Injury List. It used to be the Disabled List. Injury List is so much more informative.

The Yankees are good too, and some of the past Astros/Yankees series have been memorable. The plane was amusingly filled with Astros fans, so we figuratively if not literally bumped fists and high-fived and contemplated the fun of a baseball weekend in New York. Had we realized a beer would be $14.25, and worse the selection would be lousy, maybe we’d have been less enthusiastic, but even at $14.25 and lousy it was a beer at a baseball game.

On the plane I was thinking about fish, and specifically about fish in Kansas, and how Kris and I should take the dogs and the skiff and drive north through Oklahoma and Kansas all the way to North Dakota—I reckon it would be the only technical saltwater poling skiff to ever visit North Dakota. I was thinking about when the Astros schedule for 2020 would be released, and how it would be good if they played Minnesota or a Pennsylvania or Ohio team so that we could include them as part of fishing. Kris already has Ohio pegged for April or May fishing and a trip to McGee Marsh to see the spring warblers, and if we could include the Indians or the Reds it would be lagniappe. Then I started worrying about what could go wrong, but the answer in truth is not much. Not much could go wrong except we wouldn’t catch a fish. I bet though that the dogs would like that trip, even if they’re not technical fly-fishing dogs.

Yankee Stadium was largely a bust. The stadium’s nice enough, and the subway ride north from Washington Square is an adventure for out-of-towners, but the Astros lost, 10-6, and the game was worse than the score. It rained, the game was delayed twice, the Astros were getting walloped, and we left after the 5th inning. After last year in Tampa, and this year in New York, I’m thinking my combined fly fishing/baseball vacations may not be the very thing for the Astros won-loss record.

Friday morning we walked to the Donut Project on Bleeker Street. Herman Melville grew up on Bleeker Street. Other residents include James Agee, Robert De Niro, John Belushi, and Alicia Keys. Of the donut shops we’ve been to, the Donut Project ranked maybe a 4 out of 5 on a scale of 5, with the top spots held by the Tatonut in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, Blue Star Donuts in Portland, and Shipley’s on North Main or Ella in Houston when the glazed are fresh out of the frier. Four is a very good rating. It was stylish and imaginative, the donuts were very pretty, and then it rained. We had to walk back to our hotel in the rain.

In New York City, we stayed near Washington Square, at the Washington Square Hotel. It’s a small, old hotel, very European and very likeable. it’s only a block or so from the Stonewall Inn, and I got very confused, both as to day and date, and thought we would be leaving Washington Square on the morning of the Pride Parade. It’s the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, and the neighborhood was decked out. There’s nothing I like better than a good Pride Parade, but I figured the neighborhood would be a madhouse and that we would never get out of the City. Fortunately I’d miscalculated by a week. We’ll be in time next Saturday for the Pride Parade in Pittsburg New Hampshire, population 869.

I hadn’t really thought about it, but we will drive 390 miles almost due north from New York City to Pittsburg, N.H. Then we’ll turn around and drive south 169 miles to Manchester N.H. It’s a big swing, and a lot of miles. And none of it’s as frightening as driving out of New York City on a Friday morning. Whatever may happen, and however much a man of good will I may be, I’d rather not try to navigate Greenwich Village on the Saturday of the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riot.

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Brook Trout

Currier & Ives, Brook Trout, 1868, chromolithograph, Library of Congress.

If you fly fish, sooner or later you hear two things:

  1. You idiot. Brook Trout aren’t a trout.
  2. Brook trout have been driven out of their native range.

The first, that brook trout aren’t a trout, isn’t so much spoken as declaimed. Those aren’t trout! Those are char! What’s actually being said is that brook trout, Salvelinus fontinalis, are taxonomically closer to members of the genus Salvelinus, commonly called char, than they are to brown trout, Salmo trutta, always called trout. Of course that begs the question of why rainbow trout, Oncorhynchus mykiss, get a pass on trouthood when they’re taxonomically closer to Pacific salmon than to brown trout. And that begs the question of why Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) are a salmon when they’re taxonomically closer to brown trout than to Pacific salmon.

Worthington Whittredge, Trout Brook in the Catskills, c. 1874, National Gallery of Art, Hudson River School. There’s an angler in that painting, though well hid. He’s above the rock on the left in the small falls. The painting could have just as well been named Brook Trout in the Catskills, but not Char in the Catskills.

These are probably the sorts of existential questions that trout ponder, but for me at least there’s some irrelevance to it. One supposes that all that taxonomic relativity means something scientifically, but common usage is common usage, and it’s brook trout, not brook char. One also supposes that the taxonomic classification of beetles is just as confusing as the various fishes, but likely as not every time you say June bug no one says that’s not John but Paul.

Historic Brook Trout Eastern Range Map, Trout Unlimited.

Questions about brook trout range are much more interesting. There was a time, roughly coinciding with somewheres in the Pleistocene to 1883, when brook trout were the only river trout in eastern North America. They ranged from Georgia to as far west as Michigan and north into Canada. By the 19th Century the Catskills were the destination fishery for New York, like now New Zealand and Iceland and Christmas Island and Kansas are the destination fisheries for modern anglers, and without cars or even trains the Catskills weren’t much easier to get to than Christmas Island. When in 1830 you fished the Catskills for trout you fished for brook trout, and I suspect that no officious busybody butted in to to tell you that’s not a trout it’s a char.

Brook trout first declined in much of their native range because of over-fishing and habitat degradation. Meanwhile innovators were beginning to raise hatchery brown trout, and the browns were adaptive and more heat and environmentally tolerant. Brown trout were first introduced into Michigan, but their introducers quickly took them east. Rainbows from the west coast were also introduced. While being crowded out of the east, brook trout meanwhile were carried west, and, along with their cousin the lake trout, brook trout are now an invasive species in cutthroat habitat. Poor cutthroat. They catch it from everybody.

By the way, lake trout (Salvelinus namaycush) are not a trout but a char.

U.S. Geological Survey, Native and Introduced Ranges of Brook Trout, 2013. I have never heard of brook trout introduced in Texas, but I’m sure somebody did. Howdy!

There are efforts by the the Eastern Brook Trout Joint Venture, a coalition of states, local governments, and private entities, to restore brook trout populations and habitat in their native range and to preserve the rivers and lakes where brook trout populations are healthy. the following Joint Venture map is dated, but it indicates where to fish for native brook trout. Maine. Go to Maine. And northern New Hampshire.

Hey! We’re on our way to northern New Hampshire!

From Eastern Brook Trout Joint Venture, Eastern Brook Trout: Roadmap to Restoration, before 2012. Who doesn’t date data?

Brook trout, which are members of the char family, spawn in the autumn beginning in their second year. I came across this peculiarly lurid description of brook trout spawning on a U.S. Fish and Wildlife website:

Pre-spawning courtship of the brook trout begins with the male attempting to drive a female toward suitable gravel habitat to facilitate spawning. A receptive female chooses a spot and digs a redd. While the female brook trout is digging, the male brook trout continues his courtship activity, darting alongside the female and quivering, swimming over and under her and rubbing the female with his fins.

https://www.fws.gov/fisheries/freshwater-fish-of-america/brook_trout.html.

Dang. These are your government employees at work. Pretty salty stuff.

And speaking of salt, like rainbows brook trout can move into the ocean (in which case they’re called salties). They return to freshwater to spawn.

If there’s a creature that a brook trout can put in their mouth, they’ll eat it. They feed by sight, so they’re daytime feeders. They’re short-lived, commonly living three to four years. Their size varies based on habitat.

50 fish from American Waters, Allen & Winter, Richmond Virginia, 188__. Cigarette cards.

Man they’re pretty. They’re also not a trout, but a char.

Four to eight pound brook trout are trophies. All of the IGFA tippet class records for brook trout are from Canada, and range up to about 10 pounds. The all tackle record is a bit more than 14 pounds. Weirdly all of the women’s records are vacant except for two pound tippet, which is for a 2 lb 8 oz fish. Kris really does need to get busy.

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New Hampshire

If you study that postcard map of New Hampshire, you’ll realize pretty quick that there’s something missing: there’s no cute drawing of presidential hopefuls shaking hands or of the citizenry casting ballots. There is, oddly, an elephant down at the bottom of the state, just right of the Cathedral of the Pines–or is that Dimes?–but the fine print indicates it’s a roadside attraction not a political statement. There is also a lobster breathing fire, some bears, a zebra, and a chicken laying eggs. None of those images seem particularly political either, but some may be running for President. This is important, because forget all those notions of pastoral beauty and winter sports and mountains and trout, what New Hampshire does best is hold the first presidential primary every four years. The windup for February 2020 is going on as we speak, and driving through New Hampshire Kris and I will likely face traffic jams of Democratic wannabes vying for the nomination.

That can be both a good and bad thing. It will surely slow traffic, but if we have a flat we’ll likely have two or three senators and Beto O’Rourke available to help us change it. You can’t get that kind of service back home.

It’s true that Iowa comes before New Hampshire, but Iowa’s caucuses are a decidedly quirkier affair, and the results can be a bit off-kilter. Particularly on the Republican side caucusers tend to be both more conservative and more evangelical than the rest of the country. Who can forget that Iowa’s 2016 caucuses chose Ted Cruz as their candidate of choice? Ok, everybody has forgotten that, but really, what kind of state would elect Ted Cruz to anything? You might as well tell me that the Republican Party was going to nominate Donald Trump! What? Oh.

But perverse as it seems in retrospect that New Hampshire got the Trump part right, they did get it right. In 2016 New Hampshire gave Donald Trump more than 35% of the Republican primary vote. Trump’s win in the 2016 presidential primary effectively destroyed the campaigns of John Kasich, Jeb Bush, Lindsay Graham, Marco Rubio, Carly Fiorino, Ted Cruz, and flat-earther Ben Carson. President Trump really didn’t have any serious challengers after New Hampshire, even though the other candidates hung on. Ted Cruz hung on long enough to win 45% of the primary caucus vote in Texas, but I’m living proof that Texans are crazy.

The Great Stone Face, Franconia Notch, N.H., 1926,  Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 

Back to Iowa, the Democrats there seemed to be a bit more prescient than their Republican neighbors. In 2008 Barrack Obama’s Iowa win proved that he could be a serious candidate, and in 2016 her extremely narrow Iowa victory over Bernie Senders might have warned the Democratic Party that support for Senator Clinton was shallow. It didn’t. At least it’s satisfying now to Monday-morning quarterback. The point of all this is that sure, Iowa has its place, but it’s not New Hampshire.

Likely there are slovenly, lazy, and ignorant New Hampshineers who don’t vote and who can’t snowshoe. In New Hampshire there are likely badly constructed fences that make for bad neighbors, and there are possibly New Hampshters who might trade just a bit of freedom, like obeying speed limits and washing their hands before returning to work, rather than dying. Ok, so they might not be all they’re cracked up to be, but the winnowing of presidential hopefuls has to start someplace, and even for their long list of failures and after validating Trump in 2016 New Hampshire seems both small enough and engaged enough to carry on. You gotta start somewhere, and I’m just as glad it doesn’t start with me. February 2020 here we come.

Edward French, M.D., “Good Fishing,” photograph by Arthur F. Sturtevant, at 284, The Granite Monthly, Concord, New Hampshire, 1895.

Just one other thing about that postcard. There sure are a lot of New Hampshire women who wear bathing suits. Do you think that’s year-round? I’d better warn Kris. She probably wouldn’t think to take a swimsuit.