Tag: Fly Shops

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Three Rivers, Trout, Montana, September 14-20, 2025 (49)

Montana was supposed to be our final state, but I screwed up. I kept delaying New Jersey, so now it’s our last state. We may not make it to New Jersey this year, so we may not finish all 50 states until 2026, but it doesn’t matter. Like the baseball pundits say, this is a marathon, not a sprint. Short of Divine Intervention, Global Warming, or the Department of War, we will finish, but when we finish is a bit up in the air.

It’s ok. After all, I’m sure that if I’d really thought about it, I would have chosen New Jersey as our final state over Montana. Who wouldn’t rather go to New Jersey? There’s no Real Housewives of Montana. The pizza is better in New Jersey. Montana doesn’t have the Sopranos, though to quote Tony Soprano, chi sono in Montana molti altos. 1

Montana does have really beautiful rivers loaded with fish flowing through really beautiful valleys surrounded by really beautiful mountains, and I’m sure if you looked hard enough you could find some ok pizza.

If you don’t fly fish, you might not know that Montana is a fishing Mecca. The 2020 census counted 42 residents of Craig, Montana. For those 42 residents I counted three fly shops all packed wall to wall with interesting and costly fly-fishing bibelots.2 In 42-resident Craig I counted at least 43 drift boats, maybe 72 if you throw in the rafts. You can’t cast a wooly bugger in Montana without foul-hooking a drift boat, fishing guide, fly shop, or craft beer with a fishy name. You could spend a week just traveling from Montana fly shop to Montana fly shop, and you could spend enough dinero shopping in those fly shops to earn your dedicated angler badge with nary a line cast.

Kris did some shopping. She bought a scarf in rainbow trout colors, and some stickers for my guitar case.

We did cast lines, too, in three parts of the Madison River–twice in the upper Madison above Ennis Reservoir3 and once below. We fished the Jefferson River and then the Missouri below Craig. We fished five days in a row, pretty much all day long every day, and then on the sixth day we rested.4 You could almost say we spent those five days fishing the same river, since the Missouri starts where the Jefferson, Madison, and Gallatin Rivers meet. We were always fishing the Missouri, more or less.

On previous trips we had fished the Missouri in North Dakota and at least crossed it in Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, and Missouri . . . In fact, the only state where both us and the Missouri wandered but failed to meet was South Dakota. From the Black Hills it was always to our north and east, cutting a line through the state’s dead center and then twisting east. In all those not-Montana states the Missouri is usually big and fat and cloudy, as if it were working up enough grit to join the Big Muddy. In Montana it is clear and clean and fresh from mountain snow.

All through the Missouri’s path there were the reminders of Lewis and Clark, who travelled the Missouri from St. Louis to its source in Montana before they crossed the Rockies.5 Lewis and Clark got to Montana before us, and they probably caught more fish than us, too.

Sacajawea Hotel, Three Rivers, Montana

But we caught plenty. We fished with Montana Angler, on a strange and expensive week in RVs. It was supposed to be the finale, so expense be damned, and for me it was also my chance to seriously fish the Montana promised land. Montana Angler would choose five rivers to fish, choose campsites, provide the RVs, a cook and drivers,6 drift boats, flies, leaders, and fishing guides. We would show up. We didn’t even have to bring rods if we didn’t want to, though of course we did. It’s stupid, but over time rods become very personal, plus you should never miss an opportunity to lug a fly rod through an airport. It is such a manly thing to do.

On the days we fished we were up in the morning around six, were given coffee and fed breakfast, and then carted off by a guide with a drift boat to fish a new river for the day. They brought lunch. They brought flies. They brought us. After a day’s fishing we were brought back to a different campground in the evening and they gave us appetizers, drinks, and then fed us dinner. It was serious glamping, and we were really only left to our own devices for showers and getting into bed at night. It was strange not because it wasn’t a great adventure, but because for six nights and five days it was stress-free travel. Lewis and Clark should have had it so easy.

Mheberger, map of the Madison River created with Global Watersheds web app, Wikipedia. At the top of the map is the confluence of the Jefferson and Madison (and just a bit further north the Gallatin) to form the Missouri.

Our friends, Shelley and Mark Marmon, went with us. Mark is well-known among Houston fly fishers as a casting instructor and freshwater guide, particularly for carp–a current it-girl for fly fishing–and we’ve known Shelley since law school. Shelley only wants to fish for trout, and every other fly fisher we know in Houston seems mostly to want to fish saltwater. Saltwater is where only a relative few freshwater trout go for their gap year. This was Shelley’s chance for a week of unremitting troutiness.

Whatever the fish, there are lots of different ways to travel to fly fish. You can drive to a farm pond and spend a pleasant hour catching bluegill. You can drive twelve hours, spend an unpleasant night trying to sleep in the the front seat of your car, and then the next morning wade into a strange river hoping you’ve picked the right spot. You can fly first class and spend a lot of money to stay at a five-star lodge and be driven or boated or flown to a river or saltwater flat to fish. We’ve done all of those things. This trip was like a lodge on wheels, or even more like a river tent camp on wheels, and Montana Angler did a great job putting it together.7

Kris and I have talked a good bit about buying an RV–I suspect it’s impossible to love road trips and be of a certain age and not consider buying an RV. Who hasn’t coveted an Airstream, and what adventure isn’t promised by a Winnebago Revel? What we learned from a week in RVs was that I am not cut out for the Van Life. RVs are either manageable on the road but a bit cramped inside, or if not a bit cramped should only be driven by retired long-haul truckers. Frankly, I figure that I’ve spent at least a year of my life sleeping in tents, and if I need to stay in a campground tents are just fine by me. Tents are cozy. You don’t have to insure a tent.

That said, there are surely people who would love the mechanics of staying in an RV, and for anyone who fly fishes who is also considering an RV, I would highly recommend spending a week on the Montana Angler trip. If you haven’t RV’d before (as we had not), I suspect you would fill in the blanks, good and bad. And then at the end of the week you could either just walk away or head toot sweet to your nearest friendly RV dealer.

I suspect our next trip will likely involve a fishing lodge. You can meet a lot of interesting people in a fishing lodge.

Shelley and Mark in Tim’s drift boat, demonstrating the proper Houstonian huddling technique for the freezing 60° weather.

We had brought along our own interesting people, but we met some too, including our guides, Carter Capute and Tim Patella. Both were young, fishy guys.8 We fished four days with Carter, and one with Tim. The Marmons, on the other hand, fished four days with Tim and one day with Carter–funny how that worked out. There was no preference involved, unless it was on the guides’ part, or maybe poor Carter had pulled the short straw. Both guides were great, knowledgeable, and both were good company in the camp and on the river.

The Rivers were each different. The Missouri was wide,9 mossy, and crowded. The Jefferson was small, less than 30 yards across I think, and on the day we fished the Jefferson we saw no other boats. We caught the most fish on the Madison, both the lower and the upper, and on the day we got out of the drift boat to wade in the Madison I reconfirmed that wading is my favorite way to fish. There is just something about wading in a river that is so childlike, purposeless, and mesmerizing. Fishing from a drift boat has the virtue of being lazier, there’s someone else to do most of the work for you, and it’s safer for us old folks, but walking into a river is just the completest thing.10

All four of us caught fish. As I mentioned, Mark discovered long ago that you could catch carp on the fly in Houston bayous, so he had a special affinity for mountain whitefish. Like carp, whitefish are often considered a trash fish. Historically trout anglers have hated whitefish, and I have never understood why. They are plentiful, fun to catch, are a salmonid just like the beloved trouts and chars and salmon, are native to their waters, and are a predictor of environmental quality. I stood in the Madison and caught eight whitefish in a row, some up to 20 inches, and I caught them with glee. After all, eight whitefish in a row was certain to put me well ahead of Mark for the week’s unofficial whitefish tourney. Not that Mark knew there was a whitefish tourney, and not that I was counting.

We fished with a bead-headed nymph under a crawfish imitation, often with added weight to get the flies deep. I thought about using what I use at home to imitate crawfish, but could never work up the nerve–guide-confidence is a big part of my confidence when I’m fishing new places. The leaders were 5x or so, and were variants from anything I’d ever fished with. In addition to a large floating indicator/bobber, they included a bright orange two-foot bit of monofilament at the fly line that served as an additional indicator.

Because the rivers we fished are fed principally by snowmelt and by September were seasonally shallow, the guides told us not to mend, but to let the fly line belly in the current to stay tight to the fly and to impart dibs and dabs of movement to the big crayfish patterns. After 30 years of being taught to mend to keep from dragging the fly, it was almost painful to leave the line alone. Don’t tell Carter and Tim, but most of the time I went ahead and mended anyway, especially when I was in the back of the drift boat out of their direct gaze. I’m certain they didn’t notice, and never once thought why can’t that idiot follow my instructions.

We never fished dry flies. I had expected in early fall that we’d be able to fish grasshopper patterns on the surface, and I’d brought a small box of my favorites. Carter and Tim told us though that this fall there weren’t enough hoppers for the trout to key on them. Apparently there had been a late freeze in June, and this year’s crop of grasshoppers was decimated by the freeze. It was a shame, because I love to fish with grasshopper flies. They’re big and I can see them, and I had purposefully chosen September because of the likelihood of hoppers.

This week in the journal Nature11 there was an article about the changes in fish populations caused by warming rivers. Every angler knows that rivers are warming. For fly fishers global warming is measured in higher afternoon water temperatures, and it has changed the months when we fish. July and August, which used to be prime, are now often confined on cold water rivers to mornings. In rivers like Montana’s, the study reported that with warming, fish populations were diminished overall, and while the fish were often larger, there were fewer smaller fish.

Whether it was because of Montana, good guiding, or climate change, that was consistent with what we saw. We didn’t catch a lot of small fish, but plenty of fish that I considered large, 18 inches or larger. We didn’t just catch mountain whitefish, either. We caught plenty of browns and rainbows. In fact we caught everything we might have wanted except for a native cutthroat. We even caught native whitefish.

Now if we could just get to New Jersey, where the real fishing happens.

  1. Properly it’s chi sono in Montana molti alti, “in Montana there are many highs,” not chi sono molti altos, but then it wouldn’t be a stupid joke about Tony Soprano. You’ll just have to suffer for my art, and also for my Italian. ↩︎
  2. I have only seen the word bibelot in print once, 40 years ago in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady. I’ve wanted to use it ever since, this was my chance, and I took it. Sorry. ↩︎
  3. There were at least five fly shops in the town of Ennis, population 917. ↩︎
  4. The seventh day we went fishing again, but that’s a different story. ↩︎
  5. It was Lewis and Clark who gave Montana rivers their governmental names. Jefferson, of course, was President, Madison Secretary of State, Smith Secretary of the Navy, and Gallatin Secretary of the Treasury. The political names came in a rush, just before they got to the Rockies, It was as though they suddenly recalled that they were on one of the first governmental boondogles, and that they needed to pay homage to the politicos back home. Before Montana, Lewis and Clark had relied on whim, Indian names, events, members of the Corps of Discovery, and crushes on girls back home to pick place names. The political sops came in one great gush, and its fun to work out what river is who. ↩︎
  6. In addition to our drivers, Justin Helfer was our camp manager and cook, and Tyler Orszulak was the chief factotum. The food was always great, our beds were always made. ↩︎
  7. From what I can tell Montana Angler is one of the largest (if not the largest) Montana angling operations, and the RV trip is only one of many ways they put people onto Montana water, including tent camps on the Smith River, lodges, horse pack trips, and day trips. They also have a nice flyshop in downtown Bozeman, but every Montana resident has a flyshop stashed somewhere. ↩︎
  8. In the 2020 census, a bit over 33% of Bozeman’s population were young fishy guys. ↩︎
  9. I can’t mention the Missouri River without setting off “Oh Shenandoah” as an earworm, and mentioning the wide Missouri certainly isn’t helping. There are recorded versions of “Oh Shenandoah” by the jazz guitarist Bill Frisell, Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Bobby Darin, Jerry Garcia and David Grisman, Jerry Reed, Kansas, Bruce Springsteen, and, I kid you not, Tom Waits with Keith Richards. I hope Keith Richards is supplying the guitar solo, and not the background vocals. ↩︎
  10. The day after we waded we both needed Tylenol, but President Trump said it was ok because as far as I know neither of us is pregnant. Part of the completeness of wading is the exercise of muscle groups you had forgotten. ↩︎
  11. That’s the way you’re required by law to refer to the journal Nature. You can’t say this week in Nature, and even if you were so inclined in some states you might be arrested for saying this week in the magazine Nature. You have to say the journal Nature, like it was one word. Vaughan, Ian P., Climate change is reshaping fish communities in the United States, the journal Nature, September 24, 2025, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02826-x. ↩︎
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Missouri Packing List

It’s been a few weeks and a trip to Cuba since we went to Missouri, but there are interesting things to add about Missouri, and by now the tornado is mostly forgotten.

Gear

We fished part of a day at Roaring River State Park. It’s a pretty Ozark mountain river, and it’s easy to wade. It was a bit crowded though. Why do I ever fish on a Saturday? Since Kris and I are both retired we don’t have to anymore, and having a place to ourselves is such a joy. Still, it was a pretty park, and we used typical trout set ups, 9′ 5-weight rods with floating lines. I caught two fish, both rainbow trout. We fished until the park trout permit pinned to my cap blew off and floated downriver.

The river is stocked from a nearby hatchery, and it was a mix of wild and stocked trout. For some folks stocked fish may seem like opportunity, but it’s always less desirable to fish for stocked fish than wild fish. I can’t usually catch much of either one, so I guess it’s not that one’s harder to catch than the other. Wild fish are just better.

I caught both trout on the Roaring River on a mop fly over a hare’s ear nymph, both fished under the surface. Mop flies are tied from one of those fuzzy mops, and are considered by some as a cheap trick. Don’t tell anyone that I used one.

I kinda like mop flies because you can get a lifetime supply of tying materials with a single trip to Walmart.

The next day we fished Crane Creek in Crane, Missouri, which is another pretty Ozark stream, and which is almost but not-quite famous. In the late 1800s, railroad workers dumped California McCloud River rainbow trout off of a railroad bridge into Crane Creek. Cane Creek hasn’t really been stocked much since, and the fish there today are the descendants of those original fish without significant interference. They may be the purest genetic strain of McCloud rainbows in the country, including those in the McCloud River.

Cane Creek

Stocking trout in rivers that support wild trout is controversial. It introduces non-native fish and diseases, and the stocked fish are just enough competition with the natives to hurt. The stockees don’t survive much either. The best-managed states, Montana for instance, have stopped stocking where there are wild trout, and a lot of the nation’s best rivers are never stocked. A creek that hasn’t been stocked, or a creek where stocking was abandoned, is a bit of a gem. That’s why a place like Crane Creek is someplace to look for.

We were there on a Sunday, and Crane Creek was also a little crowded, but I swear they were the nicest people I’ve ever come across on a river. We were at th park in the Town of Crane, population 1,495, and people invited me over to fish next to them. It was unnatural.

Crane Creek fish are small, and I fished with my tiniest rod. This is where I get goofy. Goofier. The truth is I buy fly rods and reels not because they’re better–almost every fly rod and reel is better than I am–but because they’re pretty. If I’m going to buy a reel, I don’t go in thinking that I want this reel because it has the very latest drag system and faster line retrieve, I buy it because I think it looks good. Of all the fly fishing gear I own–and I own a stupid amount of fly fishing gear–this is my prettiest rod and reel:

It’s an 8 1/2 foot Winston Boron IIIx 3-weight rod made in Montana, a rod that is way too lightweight for most of my fishing, and it’s just the loveliest shade of emerald green, with nickel silver fittings and a burled maple reel seat. The reel is a tiny Hardy Marquis 2/3 reel made in England. Are they appreciably better than any other 3-weight rod or reel? No. Could I have found a perfectly decent rod and reel for a third of the price? Absolutely. Are there any rods that look better? Well, maybe some custom classic bamboo. My goodness they’re pretty, and when the fish are small enough it just makes me idiotically happy to use them.

On Crane Creek I caught two small trout on a size 16 hare’s ear nymph under a size 14 royal Wulff, and Kris caught another. I picked the hare’s ear and royal Wulff because, well, they’re classic flies and I thought they matched that rod and reel. I’ve got standards, and I’m not fishing any mop flies with this rod.

Royal Wulff

Branson

I don’t like Branson. Am I being a snob? Of course. I have friends and family who love to go to Branson. I don’t.

There is a Trump Store, and there are shows.

I can’t think of anything worse than going to a show, unless it’s going to a Trump Store. You say the word show to me, and I feel queasy. Las Vegas? Oh lord, don’t make me go. I don’t gamble, and in Las Vegas there are shows. My daughter says the shopping is great in Las Vegas, but how can that be? I don’t think there’s a single fly fishing shop. Las Vegas at least has a minor league baseball team. I don’t think there’s any baseball in Branson.

The last show I went to voluntarily was Cirque de Soleil some 15 years ago, and I know those performers were miraculous, and that there are otherwise rational people who think that Cirque de Soleil is the best thing going. I know in my heart of hearts that that very show I went to was in all ways wonderful, but me? I was bored out of my mind. I’m still bored just thinking about it.

Maybe I need to go to a show with some mostly-naked ladies. At least I’d like the costumes.

In Branson, there are shows a-plenty, and what’s worse they’re all shows that revel in clean living. There’s Dolly Parton’s Stampede Dinner and Show, Hamners’ Unbelievable Magic Variety Show, WhoDunnit Hoedown and Murder Mystery Show, the Grand Jubilee Show, All Hands on Deck Show, Legends in Concert Show, Shepherd of the Hills Outdoor Drama Show . . . The list just won’t stop. You think you’re on a river in the Ozark backcountry away from all the shows, and you come across a flier for the Amazing Acrobats of Shanghai Show.

I’ve got nothing against clean living, and I consider myself a reasonably clean liver. I know and love several devout Baptists, and even some vegetarians, but clean living commodified into a show? I can’t think of a less appealing combination. Branson is one of those rare places where a soupçon of depravity would improve the moral tone.

I guess they do fish with mop flies, and plenty of people consider that depraved.

Donuts

We found two donut shops, though I’m sure there were more.

Parlor Doughnuts was a bit off the beaten path in a strip center. They sold gourmet donuts,((I’ve created a donut shop classification system, and there are four categories. Traditional shops include Houston’s Shipley’s, Krispy Kreme’s, Dunkin’, or the very best donut shop in the world, Ocean Springs, Mississippi’s Tato-Nut Doughnut Shop. Parlor Doughnuts is a chain in the Gourmet Category, and gourmet donuts are a bit more creative, with upscale whatnots coming to the fore. Portland’s Blue Star or Albuquerque’s Rebel come to mind. Experiential donut shops have let creativity run amock, and they are my least favorite kind of donut shop–I’m talking to you, VooDoo. A Cambodian donut shop is a clean, well-lighted place that is almost certainly located in a strip center. Everything is basic but good enough, and the owners are at the counter. Cambodian donutries can have flashes of brilliance–the boudin kolache was invented in a Cambodian donut shop and that deserves a Michelin star, or at least a James Beard nomination. It’s fusion cuisine at its finest.)) and the donuts were a bit elaborate for my taste, but I’d go back. I’d certainly go back if the choice was the other place we tried, Hurts.

Hurts is experiential. It’s next door to the Trump Store on the main drag, and it’s huge for a donut shop. There was a long line for the donuts. There were flavors like cotton candy, and cookie monster, and dirt worms, and every donut seemed created for a 9-year old, which I’m not. When I got to the counter, they were out of plain glazed.

The donuts were cold and forgettable. Kris wanted to chuck them and go back to Parlor.

AirBnB

We stayed in a nice pet-friendly AirBnB on the lake on the edge of town. It was just far enough from Branson’s center to forget where we were, and the owner left us a plate of cookies. They were good home-made cookies, too. There was an old canoe and a beat up bamboo fly rod hung as decorations above the fireplace, and I took that as a good omen. I sat on the enclosed porch and read Huck Finn, and, notwithstanding the No Trespassing signs, took the dogs for walks down to the lake. I’m pretty certain those signs weren’t meant for me.

Fly Shops

There are at least a couple of fly shops in Branson, but we only went to one, River Run Outfitters. We were supposed to fish with guides from the shop, but they talked us out of going. It was cold, in the 40s, and all the floodgates on the dam were open. The wind was gusting up to 40 mph. It was dangerous, and what’s worse we weren’t likely to catch anything. They gave us free coffee and good advice on where to fish instead. I bought some mop flies.

Restaurants

Branson is not a restaurant town. Don’t get me wrong, there are lots of restaurants, but they all seem to have names like Hungry Hunter or Pickin’ Porch Grill. There are lots of barbecue places, but I’ve made the mistake of eating Missouri barbecue once before, in Kansas City, and I won’t do that again. Those people eat melted cheese on brisket, which should only be done in leftover brisket enchiladas.

The Keeter Center at College of the Ozarks promised farm to table dining, and I guess it was, but mostly everything just seemed big. Big room, big appetizers, big iced tea. . . Big ideology. I don’t know, it just didn’t click.

See that dish right there? That’s the Brussels sprout nachos appetizer, which as i recall was a lot of chopped up Brussels sprouts and feta on a lot of fried wontons. Had they artfully arranged four or five of those on a plate and charged me $12, I would have eaten them and said that’s ok, but that pile of stuff for $12 was too daunting. All I could think was man-oh-man, that’s big.

All of the waiters at Keeter Center are students at College of the Ozarks, and the hostess told us all about it, and then the waiter told us all about it. It’s a free Christian college, well, free in exchange for work. I’m pretty sure that I couldn’t have gone there without lots of conversations with a dean.

The next night we played it safe and went to two of Branson’s sushi joints, Mitsu Neko and Wakyoto. They were fine, and there were no Brussels sprouts. There was some kale, but I think it was purely decorative.

Playlist

Missouri has produced some magnificent music, and I’m still listening to that playlist. Josephine Baker was from St. Louis, and maybe I might have enjoyed one of her shows. From Wikipedia:

Her performance in the revue Un vent de folie in 1927 caused a sensation in [Paris]. Her costume, consisting of only a short skirt of artificial bananas and a beaded necklace, became an iconic image and a symbol both of the Jazz Age and the Roaring Twenties.

Now that’s a costume, and there are some fun recordings of her singing jazzy French stuff.

Missouri had great jazz. You wouldn’t think it, would you? But in the 1920s, Prohibition wasn’t really enforced there, and 18th and Vine in Kansas City was as lively as anyplace in the country. The Kansas City Big Bands had their own style, blusier than New York or Chicago, with a frantic quality that makes you drive just a little faster if your foot’s on the peddle. There are great black big bands, Bennie Moten’s Kansas City Orchestra, Andy Kirk, George E. Lee, Count Basie . . . Two of the great jazz saxophonists, Lester Young and Charlie Parker, both came out of Kansas City.

There’s rock ‘n roll, too. Big Joe Turner is a joy, then there’s Chuck Berry, Ike and Tina Turner, Sheryl Crow, Michael McDonald, and T Bone Burnett. The Beatles went to Kansas City, or at least they were going.

St. Louis Blues has been covered by Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith, Louis Prima, Doc Watson, Herbie Hancock, Eartha Kitt, Art Tatum, and Ella Fitzgerald, and if your name is Louis, you can still meet Judy Garland there.

Ojon Mill, Photograph of Lester Young, 1944, Time Magazine, Volume 17, Number 13, Public Domain.

Guitar

I took my old Kohno classical, and spent some time at night playing. I don’t remember what, but I’ve been working on an arrangement of Gershwin’s Somebody Loves Me. That’s likely.

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The Wulff School of Fly Fishing Redux

We went to Connecticut and caught fish. It was our state number 30, but on the way to Connecticut we went to New York to the Wulff School of Flyfishing for a two-day casting clinic. We’d been to the Wulff School before, in 2019, and when we went we caught our New York fish in the Beaverkill. Before we took the trout class. The trout class includes things like “Knots You Can Tie” and “The Bugs We Like Best.” There was a lot of casting then, but this time it was all casting. A lot of casting. Then some more casting. And then we went out to the pond to cast.

I signed us up for the casting clinic for Kris’s January birthday because, unlike me, Kris’s fishing is limited by her casting. My fishing, on the other hand, is limited by my head. Maybe I’ve made some progress in my life-long battle against stupid, but  that correction is more than I could hope for from a casting clinic.

Joan Wulff wrote the book on fly casting; one of the good books anyway. If you want to learn to cast a fly rod, get Joan’s book. Then go take some lessons because, while it’s great for review, learning to fly cast from a book just ain’t likely.

I do have problems with my cast. If you imagine a fly cast, there are two parts to it: there’s the back cast, where the fly line rolls out beautifully behind you. I can’t see it while I do it, but I’ve been told I have a great back cast. I suspect this is a little like being told you have a great butt, not that I recall ever being told I have a great butt, but if I were so told I’d be flattered. On a day-to day basis though, in and of itself, it’s generally not very useful.

The school’s founder, Joan Wulff, is a great caster. She won the National Fisherman’s Distance Fly title in 1951 with a cast of 131 feet. Between 1943 and 1960, she won 17 national titles–not the women’s title, mind, but the all of ’em, men-can-compete-too-if-they-can-just-keep-up title. In 1960 she took the New Jersey distance casting competition with a winning cast of 161 feet. That’s more than half a football field, and about 101 feet further than I can cast on a really good day.  She was a pretty, petite woman in 1960, and that hasn’t changed.

Joan married Lee Wulff in 1967. Lee Wulff was the sort of famous angler who, as a kid back in the 60s, I watched on Sunday afternoon fishing shows after football was over. If you didn’t watch famous anglers on Sunday afternoon fishing shows back in the 60s, you really missed out–it was a lot better than football. Lee created a whole series of flies, the most famous being the Royal Wulff. it’s certainly as pretty as a fly can be. He popularized catch and release fishing. He died in an airplane crash in 1991.

Mike Cline, Royal Wulff, Wikipedia, 2008

In 2002, Joan married Ted Rogowski, a Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft patent attorney, which, in the legal vernacular, is an elite lawyer at a white shoe law firm. He was a friend and fishing companion of Lee. He was a co-founder of the Theodore Gordon Flyfishers in New York, and, according to the patent lawyer board member I talked to at the Beaverkill Valley Inn (they were there for their annual dinner), Rogowski was an author of the Clean Water Act and one of the folk responsible for founding the EPA. At 93 he was featured on the cover of Fly Tyer magazine with his article “A Better Way to Tie Mayfly Wings.” It’s a good article, though not having tied a lot of mayfly wings, I can’t vouch for it being better.

Rogowski also represented Ted Williams during Williams’s Sears days. The guy knew Ted Williams.

Joan is now 95. She was around for most of our class and made sure the instructors remembered everything. There were four instructors,** and Kris and I had met all of them before–there’s a lot of consistency at the Wulff School. We had caught our New York fish with Craig Buckbee on the Beaverkill. He seemed happy enough to see us.  He must not have remembered my casting.

Anyway, there are two parts to the cast, the back cast where the line rolls out beautifully behind you, and then the forward cast where the line rolls out beautifully in front of you. To each of the back cast and the forward cast, there are three parts to create that roll: the loading move, the power snap, and the follow-through. The instructors drill this in the class, explain it, demonstrate it, hold your hand to show you how it feels, yell it across the pond, and whisper it in your ear while you sleep.

What a forward cast is supposed to look like.

What’s great at the school is the consistency of the message. They’ve been teaching the same thing over and over and over for 40 years, and there’s real value in that consistency. If anybody deviates, Joan’s there to pull them back into line.

And the casting instruction works. At least it works if you can do it: there’s no magic cure for ineptitude. My problem is that I’ve got this cute butt on the backside and a mess on the front. There’s the loading move, the power snap, and the drift that perfectly rolls out the line behind me, and then on the forward cast I skip the loading move and move straight to the power. Wham.

A tailing loop. How my cast looks way too often.

It’s not that maybe 70% of the time through long adjustment to bad habits I can’t get the line to go more or less where I want it to go. I can cast well enough using my sloppy ways to catch fish and maybe even fool some people some of the time, but it’s not good. About every fifth or sixth cast my line is going to cross itself (there’s a name for what happens, a tailing loop), and the line is going to puddle 30 feet out and tie itself into knots. It’s ugly. It’s inefficient. It’s frustrating. It’s all my fault.

A common result of my lousy forward cast.

It’s what I’ve learned.  I know it, my muscles remember it, and I don’t know if I’ll ever get over it. It’s certainly mild as bad habits go, a lot milder than stupid, but it’s a mess.

Sometimes I just cast backwards.  I’ve got a really cute butt.

** Sheila Hassan from Boston, Mark Wilde from Vermont, Dennis Charney from State College, Pa., and Craig Buckbee from Livingston Manor, New York. These are great people. Each of them separately guides and gives casting lessons, and Dennis is associated with a fly shop we visited in State College, Pennsylvania. State College is mostly known for its fly fishing and its ice cream.

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I Got Speyed, Redux

Lately I’ve had rod fever. This happens from time to time. I convince myself that there’s a hole in the universe that can only be filled by possession of. . . some rod, some rod that is newer and niftier and pretty as a happy child hunting Easter eggs on a bright spring morning and that will make me a better caster and a better catcher and a better husband and father and human being. Rod fever may happen to me more than most, but I doubt it. And it never quite works out the way I think. I’m always still just me.

Last year I got rod fever bad for Spey rods, which is a peculiar thing for a Houstonian since there’s no real Spey fishing for at least a thousand miles. Still. I bought a Spey rod, and in 2018 we fished four days for steelhead on the Deschutes River in Oregon. We swung flies with long 13-foot Spey rods, about four feet longer than normal rods, and tried to learn Spey casts, or at least enough to get through four days’ fishing.

To most fly fishers, Spey casting is exotic and mysterious. It’s not like the standard overhead cast. It’s done with two hands, not one. There is no backcast; the line never lays out behind the angler, instead there’s some flippy dippy stuff that eyesight and brain can’t quite follow. After a couple of incantations and some pyrotechnics the caster shoots the line forward, as much as twice the length of a normal cast. It is a lovely, magical thing to see, baffling and irresistible.

Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland, J. Cary, Detail from a new map of Scotland, from the latest authorities, 1801, London.

The River Spey is in northeast Scotland, and the long rods and the two-handed casts originated on Scottish Atlantic salmon rivers. Speyside single malt Scotch is also from the region of the River Spey, Glenfiddich and Macallan being the best known, so there are many good things from thereabouts. What could better define a day of manly sport than putting on a bit of tweed, spending a day casting a Spey rod, and following it all with a wee or not-so-wee dram of rich and smoky Speyside? What man or woman could want more?

The long rods have advantages. They don’t require a backcast, so you can stand by a bank in a river and cast without hanging up in the branches behind you. They cast far, so you can cover lots of ground on big water, and the rod length better manipulates the line once it’s on the water. After four days of fishing I could cast 50 or 60 feet with the spey rod, but I fished near a good caster, Louis Cahill of Gink and Gasoline. He consistently shot line twice the distance I could manage, and it was beautiful.

Spey rods have some disadvantages. They’re not particularly accurate, and casting that far usually isn’t necessary. They’re made to swing flies, and swinging flies, isn’t common. Swinging flies lets the line pull the fly down and across in an arc, with the angler as the pivot point. It’s an old method of fly fishing, arcane even, with plenty of modern arcana pitched in to make the whole business obscure and esoteric, but except in the Pacific Northwest and maybe Scotland swinging flies isn’t common. Instead we let flies drift naturally with the current, or retrieve streamers. We don’t let flies swing.

I hadn’t seriously touched my Spey rod since our trip to Oregon, but we need to catch a fish in Washington State, and the obvious play, the right color of fish, is Olympic Peninsula winter steelhead. Kris didn’t hesitate. “Of course,” she said. “Let’s go,” she said. “And bring along some whisky.” Ok, she didn’t say that last, and she didn’t spell whiskey like a Scot when she didn’t say it, but sometimes one needs to extrapolate.

So I emailed Jason Osborn at The Portland Fly Shop and asked Jason who we should fish with in Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. Jason said he was guiding in southern Washington, but that the Olympic Peninsula was a good idea. He said that for February we should check with Jack Mitchell’s The Evening Hatch.

But I also had rod fever, I wanted–no, I needed–another Spey rod, so I asked Jason to send along a 3-weight rod and a matching line because suddenly Spey fishing for trout is all the rage, and like I said, I had rod fever. This 3-weight business takes a bit of explanation. Fly rods are in weights, higher weight rods are used for bigger fish. If you want to catch a 200 pound marlin, a 14-weight would do the job. If you want to catch a bluegill, a 3-weight would be the very thing. For steelhead, the usual weight is somewhere around a 7- to 9-weight. A 3-weight is built for smaller fish.

Jason made a couple of suggestions and I took the cheapest, a Redington Hydrogen trout Spey made in China. I should say it wasn’t cheap, but for a Spey rod it was pretty reasonable. It’s a rather homely fella, with none of the design flourishes that would come with a high-dollar rod, but it’s well put together. It’s perfectly good to fool with in local waters.

And for most of what we catch in Texas rivers a 3 weight will work just fine. It would let us practice spey casts before our trip to Washington, and that’s all I really wanted. The rod came, and we drove three hours to New Braunfels to see if there were any trout yet in the Guadalupe. There weren’t, they won’t be stocked until Thanksgiving, and the flow in the river was ridiculously low, but I hadn’t forgotten everything I knew, the rod cast fine, and there were bluegill and bass. I caught a Guadalupe bass, the state fish of Texas, swinging a girdle bug. I also caught a tiny bluegill on a partridge and yellow. What sounds more manly than a partridge and yellow? Just forget that tiny bluegill part.

And then I went home and had a wee dram. Or two.

T.E. Pritt, Pritt’s Orange and Partridge, Plate 6 – Yorkshire Trout Flies, 1885, Goodall and Suddick, Leeds.