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Dynamic Nymphing

Bayou City Anglers had speakers Thursday on fishing the Guadalupe River from Go Outside Expeditions. It was a great presentation, and they touted Dynamic Nymphing by George Daniel.  BCA was out of the book, but it was available to download on Kindle–which is probably good anyway.  We are drowning in books.

It is the first fly fishing book I’ve bought in years. I guess mostly in these late years I fish some kind of streamer: saltwater, bass, even trout as often as not.  Streamers make sense to me.  You throw the fly out there and bring it home.

The introduction to Dynamic Nymphing was by Charles Jardine, which was interesting for two reasons.  The first was content.  He wrote something obvious, but nothing is ever obvious to me.  Jardine says that trout don’t know where he’s from, and wherever he fishes they don’t really know where they are.   They’re trout.  You fish trout essentially the same in Italy as in Argentina as on the Guadalupe River.  Productive techniques are good wherever they may be.

The second reason was because Jardine’s son, Alex, was guiding the one time I can remember getting angry, really angry, about fly fishing.  We had booked a trip with Aardvark McCleod on the Hampshire chalk streams, and Alex, who was charming and tried to explain cricket to me, made a suggestion about my casting. It was probably a great suggestion that I didn’t understand, and I ended up whacking the rod with the fly for the next hour trying to put it into practice.  Alex told me to stop, but I kept going until I finally screamed goddammit, which still embarrasses me, and almost certainly embarrassed him.  Then I went back to my old stupid cast.  The Hampshires, by the way, aren’t one of the 50 states.  They do look exactly like a Constable painting though.

As to Dynamic Nymphing, it is a how-to on both of the European styles of straight-line nymphing, and indicator nymphing.  The three things I’ve taken away so far are get rid of the split shot and use weighted nymphs, let the water move the fly most times, and stop hanging up on the rocks.  I like particularly getting rid of the split shot. I spend at least a half-hour every trip undoing the leader tangle around the split shot.  Good riddance.

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Trout Fishing in America

I just re-read Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan.  I read it last circa 1971, when I was 15 and it was all the rage.  I haven’t thought about it much since, but I started to name this site Trout Fishing in America, as though it were a child in a 60s commune, but thought better of it.  I’m not just fishing for trout.

There’s a surprising amount of internet traffic on Brautigan.  He committed suicide in 1984, apparently because along with the Summer of Love he had fallen out of favor.   His running buddy Thomas McGuane  said that ”when the 1960s ended, he was the baby thrown out with the bath water.”  But he must not be that much out of favor, because there sure is a lot written about him.

There’s a 2012 biography of Brautigan, Jubilee by William Hjortsberg.  I haven’t read the book, but the NY Times reviewed it.

I fly fish because as a kid I fished for crappie with minnows and catfish with blood bait and I read about fly fishing, which seemed altogether more serious. There was “Big Two-Hearted River,” there was an Orvis catalog I was sent because Field & Stream told me I could order it, and there was Trout Fishing in America.  The Hemingway I could fathom, the Orvis catalog was glamorous, and I don’t know what I thought about Brautigan.  I remember liking the cover photo, probably because Brautigan looked like Mark Twain and the girl looked like what the 60s were supposed to look like.

I think there’s a lot written about Trout Fishing in America because it’s a bit of an empty canvas.  If you look for grand themes, you can impose them, and maybe Brautigan’s themes were in fact grand.  I suspect though that it’s simpler than that.  It’s messy and episodic because Brautigan was messy and episodic.  It’s wry and amusing because Brautigan was wry and amusing.  It’s a bit plotless because Brautigan was plotless.  Brautigan writes about trout fishing because he liked trout fishing.  He writes about hanging out and drinking port wine with the street life in Washington Square because that’s what he did.  He writes about sex because he liked sex, and was apparently a pretty promiscuous guy–I learned from the internet that Brautigan suffered from rampant herpes and was into bondage.  At 15 it’s better I didn’t know that, and at 61 I’d rather I didn’t.  He is decidedly pre-feminist.  He is also a very clear writer, his chapters are short, and there’s enough whimsy to keep me surprised and engaged.

I like that Trout Fishing in America is each of the book, the book in the book, and the book’s other main character.  I doubt that I recognized that when I was 15.

Since I last read the book I’ve been to a lot of Brautigan’s places, San Francisco, the Big Wood River, the Redfish Lakes.  They’re real places to me now, not a mythical landscape, and I can recognize that Brautigan was talking about San Francisco and  a real trip to Idaho.  Maybe it’s just a book about trout fishing.

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Bleak Midwinter

 

Yesterday afternoon we took the boat out on Galveston Bay.  When we left the Galveston channel around 2 the bay was smooth enough to open the throttle.  It must have been somewhere close to 60˚.  We polled around Greens Lake for a bit, but saw no fish.  Low tide was hours before, but it was still low midwinter water, about 8″ where it would normally be at least a foot.  By three the wind had picked up to about 15 and shifted to the northeast. The temperature was dropping and the ride home was a tooth-rattler.  Today in Houston there’s snow, and it’s 27˚.

Sun is shining, and we’re in the Intercoastal.

These were the only other flats skiffs we saw.

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Helios 3

We took two rods to the Guadalupe, the 5 weight Orvis Helios 3 I gave Kris for Christmas and my Winston 6 weight.  This was my year for buying rods, and I bought the 6 weight Winston in June before a trip to Arkansas, and put a Hardy Duchess reel on it.  You want aesthetics?  Match a Winston with a Hardy reel and it’s a thing of beauty.  I’ve fished with an older Winston 5 weight for a while now, and I like Winstons.  I like that green.  I like the nickel hardware and the burled wood reel seats.  They’re just pretty, and they feel right to me: they have substance.

Kris though has this thing for Orvis rods, and the lighter the better.  She wanted the 8 weight, but we have a lot of 8 weights ’round here, ranging from an old Orvis Rocky Mountain on which the 25-year warranty has expired through a Helios 2.  Eight weights are really the rod of choice on the Coastal Plain, and we’ve got Sages and a Thomas & Thomas and some Orvis.  They’ll catch most things we see in saltwater, and they’ll throw big bass flies.  They’re good in wind, and there’s always wind.  Anyone needs an 8 weight, I’ve got a store full.  Plus I’d just bought a new Loomis 7.

But at the Orvis store the 8 weight Helios 3 did cast great, and I was tempted.  After all, I’d get to fish it.  But I got her the 5 weight, even though when I cast it at the store I thought it felt whispy and rattly.  She doesn’t have a 5 weight, she would only be happy with the Helios 3D, and I thought it would be a great deal because I have lots of old 5 weight reels sitting around.  I went to Bayou Cithy Angler and got her the Amplitude 5 weight mpx line.  Christmas morning she was thrilled.  I also gave her a new Astros jersey.  She was thrilled with that too.

I put the line on a Ross Cimarron reel, circa 1995, and the day after Christmas we went to the Guadalupe.  The reel was unacceptable.  Too large.  Too bulky.  Not sufficiently . . . matched. Not that aesthetics matter to me.

The day after the day after Christmas we were back at Bayou City Anglers, and she picked the Ross Colorado Light reel, the one with nothing to it but a bit of click and pawl.  I told her that she could get a much friendlier drag system–of course I didn’t tell her that every trout reel I own is click and pawl.  But why would my opinion matter? I never catch fish anyway.  And it did make a beautiful combination with that rod.  Did you know that reel has heart cut-outs, just like a circa-1973 DeRosa?

So yesterday on the Guadalupe I tried out her rod for the second time.  I’m not a bad caster, but I’ve got a tendency to get tailing loops by overpowering my forward cast, and unless I think about it I get a bit of a wrist twirl that leaves my fly five feet to the left of the fly line.  But at a reasonable distance with enough concentration I can get within a yard or so of my target. All I can say is that the Orvis casts true.  You send the fly somewhere, and it goes there.  At the store I thought it whispy.  On the water I thought it telegraphic.  Or digital. Or something.

As for the aesthetics, it’s not as pretty as my Winston, but it’s a handsome rod, especially with that Ross reel.  And when you go to pick it out of a pile of rods, it’s the easiest thing in the world to spot.