We fished Silver Creek because it’s required, like going to Wrigley Field if you like baseball. Going to Wrigley doesn’t mean that you like the Cubs: Who likes the Cubs? It doesn’t even mean you like Wrigley. It’s a dump full of drunk Cubs fans, hard tiny seats, obstructed views, cold cold wind off Lake Michigan, and was once the home of the Federal League Chicago Whales. The Whales. The Chicago Whales. Still, it is a baseball shrine, and later I always find ways to work into conversations that I went to Wrigley last time I was in Chicago.
It’s a burden to place on a small river, and it’s a slip of a river, only 12 miles long from the originating springs. It’s a mineral and bug-rich high desert river that supports populations of wild browns and rainbows and 150 species of birds. It’s not quite clear as glass and not quite smooth as glass, but it’s clear and smooth enough for the description to work, even when it’s overworked.
We fished the Silver Creek Preserve in the morning, owned and managed by The Nature Conservancy, and later in the day fished private Silver Creek water accessed by our guides, Picabo Angler. Where we fished in the Preserve the river wasn’t much more than 100 feet across. Deeper portions are fished with float tubes, but it was late September and for us Houstonians the weather was cold beyond imagining. We stayed shallow and waded until the arctic wind drove us off the creek for lunch. I swear it was colder than 60°. Brutal.
By my lights Silver Creek is bigger than a creek, smaller than a river, honestly more like a bayou, a really clear bayou without alligators and mud, and with lots of trout and lots of bugs. Silver Bayou just doesn’t have the ring of Silver Creek, though just about every state seems to have a Silver Creek this or a Silver Creek that: Silver Creek Apartments, Ranch at Silver Creek subdivision, Silver Creek Industries, or just plain ol’ Silver Creek with some water in it. There are two, count ’em two, Silver Creeks in Idaho. There’s still only one Silver Creek. Even in Idaho.
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Our particular Picabo Angler guide was Rob Curran, who also practices law in Ketchum, about 45 miles from Silver Creek. We didn’t discuss legal nuances much, just enough to get a notion of Rob’s practice. We talked more about Rob’s avocations: paragliding, mountaineering, fly fishing, ultra-marathon running, going to Baja for a month to chase rooster fish, all the usual stuff that one does. Sometimes Rob runs races where he runs up a mountain then jumps off on a paraglider, then does it again. Go figure.
There seem to be plenty of young, attractive, fit folk like Rob in Idaho, male and female, who have traded the muggle life back home for the wizarding Northwest outdoors life. Rob in fact seemed more grounded than most, balancing a law practice with all that other stuff, but they mostly scrabble together a life that makes me feel soft and paunchy and hidebound, which I guess I am, and old, which I guess I also am. But I’m also happy that way, and I doubt that at this late date anyone would hire me to guide fly fishers or work on their ski lift. If I tried paragliding I’d likely do injury to myself and others, not to mention giving my cardiologist a heart attack. And I like running my three miles every other day on the flat track around Rice, where there isn’t a single incline, unless you count the curb.
On the flight from Houston to Boise I finished Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, which when published in 1980 won the Pen/Faulkner award and was a Pulitzer finalist. I had first heard of Robinson when she published her second novel, Gilead, in 2004, twenty-four years after Housekeeping. Gilead won the Pulitzer, and is brilliant, but Housekeeping is even better. There isn’t a long list of Idaho writers, but any state should be proud to call Robinson their child, and Housekeeping must be the only great novel set in Idaho. Spoiler alert: it’s also the perfect Idaho novel. Ruthie, the child-narrator, gives up her attempts at common domesticity to become a fishing guide. Ok, not really, but close enough.
As for Silver Creek, it’s become a test of fly fishing prowess. Its clarity makes it difficult and its ties to Ernest Hemingway make it legendary–it’s Ernest’s last fishing ground and son Jack is generally credited with its preservation by the Nature Conservancy. It’s a delicate dry fly kingdom too, and in these decadent days of euro-nymphing and bobbers and droppers and whatnot that makes it special. We were there for the fall baetis and calibaetis hatch, tiny blue wing green olive mayflies and slightly less tiny blue wing green olive mayflies, but Silver Creek is most famous for early-June brown drakes, when anglers line the creek for combat fishing. We pretty much had the creek to ourselves.
Once you get off the bank and into the creek, it’s easy to wade. There are heavy river bottom weeds, but open paths of hard sand and small gravel snake through. There always seemed to be a path to where I wanted to go. I fished a 3 wt., which Rob said was about right, and Kris fished her Helios III 5 wt. We had 5X leaders, tied from a formula I cadged off of Troutbitten, though I think Kris traded hers for something less cranky. My leaders ended up closer to ten feet than nine, but when I was paying attention they turned over well enough for me, and the brown Maxima leader in the butt made them easy to watch on the water.
Was I good enough angler to fish Silver Creek? Well of course I was. Sort of. I caught fish. Lots of fish, probably 20 fish. All of them but the one rainbow I foul-hooked were circa five inches. I am the master of Silver Creek tiny browns, bright and perfect as bluegills and just as gullible. I couldn’t keep them off my baetis. Kris probably caught bigger and more fish than me. I know she caught plenty. I know she was happy.
But what the heck. I watched a lot of fish, many bigger fish, and I believed in the creek as a special place, a shrine. Clear and smooth as glass, rich with bugs, rich with fish, it’s a place that you could happily fish a season or two or ten and still learn, and that you could still happily or greedily or maybe just obsessively return to. It’s better than Wrigley, and I’m guessing there aren’t any Cubs fans. It’s just that close to perfect.
On Saturday we planned to wade fish a half day to finish off New Hampshire, then drive south four hours to Manchester for Sunday’s flight. Our guide, Chuck DeGray, said that instead of wading we should go south, down to Lancaster where the Connecticut starts warming and where instead of trout there are smallmouth and pike. We would fish for pike. He said we might not catch anything, we might not see anything, but that it was worth the try, because to heck with trout Chuck loves to fish for pike! This was the second time on the trip that a guide had said I like this, let’s try it, and the first had worked well. Pike!
Going south put us an hour closer to the airport at the end of fishing. If we didn’t take a long lunch we could fish all day and still get off the river early, and we could fish for something we’d never fished for. This was a really good plan.
When I called the Lopstick originally I’d asked about trips for pike, pike were listed on their website. Maybe it was my imagination but they seemed hesitant to send some Texas bozo after pike, and after our muskie adventure I didn’t push it. I’d already proved I couldn’t catch muskie, and I didn’t need to prove I couldn’t catch pike. But Chuck said pike, and thanks to King George II’s foresight we had already caught our fish in New Hampshire, so Pike!
This far north the Connecticut River isn’t large. It’s the longest river in the Northeast, going south 406 miles to Long Island Sound. As a comparison the Red River, the one that separates Texas and Oklahoma, is 1600 miles long, but even growing up next to it no one ever suggested let’s go fish the Red River. The upper Connecticut where we fished both days isn’t big, and on our two days it was easy to float, but it’s hard to access. It’s lined with bluffs and wooded banks and farmland, and the soft river bottom would make it hard to wade. It’s a long float sort of river.
Most of our floats it averaged maybe 150 feet across, and the day before Kris had often fished the left bank while I made a reasonably credible effort to fish stuff on the right. In normal flows it’s shallow, too, maybe five or six feet towards the center. Like they say in Galveston Bay, if you fall out of the boat the first thing you should do is stand up.
There aren’t any pike in Texas, pike are about as exotic for me as Seychelles giant trevally or Brazilian dorado so I had to study up. They are an ambush predator, which means they’re an all things come to those who wait kind of fish. They sit, they blend, they don’t cruise, and then they attack. They are demon fast from standstill to strike, and I can now attest that the strikes are unforgettable. This is not a fish that sips a fly. This is road rage.
Pike are muskie’s closest kin, and in their waters both are apex predators. Muskie grow larger, but the fish fill the same niche, Apparently they can be hard to tell apart. Pike are native both to North America and Europe, muskie only to North America.
Pike are named after the Middle Ages thrusting weapon which is also called, luckily enough, the pike. The fish look like a pike and they attack like a pike. Until gunpowder came into its own in the 18th century pike were a serious infantry weapon. As late as 1850, when John Brown planned to lead slaves in rebellion from Harper’s Ferry, he had 500 pikes made in Connecticut. Rebelling slaves were going to flock to Harper’s Ferry, be armed with Brown’s pikes and with guns from the armory, and end slavery forever. John Brown made some bad guesses about what would happen at Harper’s Ferry, and it must be the last time that anyone seriously considered using pikes as weapons, but it’s a good name for the fish. There’s something ancient and vicious about them.
In a fishy way pike are foul-tempered, and why wouldn’t they be? Just think how you’d feel if you’d watched your mother eat your little brother for lunch? Especially when you’d been saving him for yourself?
Pike have teeth, both rows of the sharp pointy kind and the Velcro-like fishy plates of teeth on the roof of their mouth. Once in, never out. A full grown pike can have up to 600 teeth. I was glad Chuck was there to take out the hooks because, well, fingers. I like having fingers.
We fished with 8 weights which is probably the weight we fish most often. I’m fairly sure there are New Hampshirite anglers who have never lifted an 8 weight, but for us they felt like home. They were matched to Orvis Mirage reels, big game reels loaded with sinking lines. I fished with an Orvis Recon rod. Coincidentally for Muskie in Wisconsin I’d fished with a ten weight Recon. It’s a fine series of rods, and after fishing with Chuck’s Orvis Access–Orvis’s older model entry-level rod– the day before I suspect that from the top of the line to bottom the Orvis rods are as consistently well designed as any rods on the market. I don’t usually fish them, but I see why Kris trusts them.
These were big flies and big fish, but it was easy enough to fish the 8 instead of a 10. The pike flies weren’t quite as big as the foot-long muskie flies. Most were only about six or seven inches, but still, these were some mighty big flies. Big rods. Big flies. Foul-tempered fish.
Chuck ties flies for part of his living so he has to tie a lot of flies fast. He said that it could take 20 minutes or longer to tie a single pike fly. The flies were gaudy things, with lots of bright colors and tinsel flash and wiggly tails. He said he sold some pike flies, but he tied a lot for himself. I’d figured out earlier that we’d be in Pittsburg, N.H., for the North Woods pride parade, and there we were, with all the feathers and tinsel we could have wanted.
Our leaders were short, four feet of probably 20 pound straight tippet ending in a 50 pound fluorocarbon bite guard of a couple of feet, and then the fly. The bite guard,—remember 600 teeth—was about as thick as kite string, but made out of the strong, abrasion-resistant flourocarbon. Toothy things ain’t leader shy. For comparison, we use a 60-pound fluorocarbon bite guard in Belize fishing, at least in concept, for 100-pound tarpon.
We fished the flies like we would have fished for river bass; cast as close as possible to the bank or structure, retrieve in short, steady strips, and then do it again. And then do it again. And then do it again. We didn’t fish the flies on the bottom of the river. They ran a couple of feet under the surface, though in deeper water I’d let the fly sink three or four feet. There was good water clarity, and I rarely lost sight of the fly.
There were downed trees in the river, and of course Kris was hung up on an underwater log when I cast under a tree and caught the first pike. Kris was snagged, Chuck was trying to net the fish and hold the boat and manage the anchor and telling me to take the rod over his head so the fish would come into his cradle net, and I was trying to keep my line and my rod out of the overhead branches. This was the Three Stooges doing battle, but the pike was caught, and for all the teeth and violence I was surprised at how pretty it was.
The colors were different with each fish caught. They were brighter silver or greener, more yellow or no yellow. The difference was radical from fish to fish. But they are so perfectly put together for what they are. Apex predators. Ambush predators. Beautiful fish.
They also fought hard. I’d read that notwithstanding their size muskie don’t put up much of a fight, not that I would know, but there was plenty to the pike. They even came out of the water to try and shake the hook. I ended up catching three and lost one, but Kris caught one and probably had three more fish come off. They didn’t make long runs, but they thrashed hard and pulled hard.
The fish I remember best was the one I didn’t land, that I never saw. I’d lost sight of the fly and then it stopped, snagged on some underwater debris. I raised my rod to unsnag it and it wasn’t snagged at all. Something big gave a great heave and roll and thrash and bit through the bite guard. It bit through the 50 pound bite guard and it was gone. I often remember fishing failures better than successes, but that was a magnificent failure.
We’ve been planning next year’s trips. I’ve suggested we go back for another shot at south Florida, though I hate to lose my special status as the only person in the world who can’t catch fish in Florida. Kris wants South Carolina. I want to do a Southwest tailwater tour in April, the Green in Utah, Lee’s Ferry in Arizona, and end on the San Juan in one long drive. And I’ve thought about Michigan, fishing the Ausable, and then around through the Upper Penninsula to Hayward, Wisconsin, for another shot at muskie, then down into the Wisconsin and Iowa driftless region for trout. I suspect as things get better sorted we might, just might throw some pike into that last northwoods mix. To heck with trout, pike! Maybe Chuck will sell us some flies.
First things first, I caught a fish, but unfortunately Kris didn’t. Actually, I caught two fish, one was a Summit Lahontan cutthroat that probably weighed two pounds. The other was a Pilot Peak Lahontan cutthroat that weighed about five pounds. Those are goodly trout for anyplace else, and they were fun to catch, but I gather they are on the small side for Pyramid Lake.
Kris meanwhile never had a fish take a fly. It was nothing she did wrong. She was casting well, and while the fishing is unique, and while we wouldn’t have figured it out on our own, with a good guide it’s not hard. We were fishing with Casey Gipson out of Reno, and Casey was all the good things a good guide should be. He had good equipment, including excellent ladders. He was patient with the birds nests we made of our leaders. He kept us at plausible locations out of the crowds. When he picked us up at the hotel he had coffee. Coffee is no small thing.
He is also a great cook. You wouldn’t think that was so important, but shows what you know. We had homemade chorizo po’boys for lunch the first day and homemade chicken burritos the second. Whatever else happened, we had great food. And coffee.
Casey’s photo. I’m the model. I’m not really sleeping. Really.
But the fishing was slow. What we kept trying to explain to Casey was that this was just a normal fishing trip with the Thomases. Unless you know that the Thomases are going to be there, April may be the best time to fish Pyramid. If we’re there the fish will be down for our visit. Honestly, except for the nap I took on the bank the second day, we fished hard, we fished reasonably well, and I didn’t hurt anybody with my casting.
Casey told us that the worst fishing days on Pyramid are the nicest days, the days when the barometric pressure is high, the breezes are gentle, and the lake is glass. The best days to fish are the days when the weather is the worst. We had nice days, beautiful days, the days of the first morning of the world. Casey worked his butt off, but what can you do? It’s easy to guide when all you have to do is net and release fish. Poor Casey had to answer all the questions we came up with because we weren’t busy, plus come up with stories to keep us engaged. Nobody ever said guiding was easy.
We had planned to fish one day on the Pyramid and one on the Truckee River, the river that carries water from Lake Tahoe down to Pyramid Lake, but the Truckee flows were dangerously high, around 6,000 cubic feet per second. Our Reno hotel room window looked down on the Truckee, and we constantly checked the river, hopeful, but then had hopes washed away. The river was dashing and carrying on and generally taunting us. It was one whole lot of silted, roiling, angry water. I’m sure most weekends it it’s the gentlest bubbling brook, perfect for a three weight bamboo rod and size 18 quill Gordons.
The first day in Nevada we drove up the Sierra Nevada to Lake Tahoe, and the last day we drove to Silver City. Both are classic Western alpine environments, formed by tectonic pressures that jumbled igneous rock into dramatic poses. There are pine trees and winding mountain roads and when it snowed on our drive to Tahoe we sang “Snow” from White Christmas. Pyramid though is different. It’s also dramatic, but in an Old Testament Biblical sort of way. It looks like where Moses and the Hebrews spent their 40 years in the Wilderness.
And there are no trees, but of course that didn’t stop me from getting my fly snagged in sagebrush. There are rocks, but the rocks aren’t the product of geologic cataclysm. The rocks are tufa deposits, a deposit of carbonate minerals like what accumulates around old plumbing where the water’s hard. Sometimes the deposits are rounded and lumpish, sometimes striated like something shattered and sharp and broken. The color of the deposits matches the sand and the sagebrush; tan, grey, barren, and dry.
The lake is on the Pyramid Lake Paiute reservation, and the fishing season is from October to the end of June. It’s huge, 28 miles long and nine miles across, but the air is so clear and dry that distances are confusing. It looks like it’s two instead of nine miles across. In the warmer months fishing is closed and other uses take over. Casey thought that the tribe closed the fishing season as much to prevent conflicts between jet skiers and anglers as for conservation.
Other than the big tufa rock, the lake shore (and the lake bed) is course sand and small broken rock, a beach perfect for summer recreation. There’s plenty of sage brush, but not much else. The near lake floor is a series of shelves, and you can see the pattern repeated on the shore. Shelf, drop, shelf, drop. The trout cruise the drops, and Casey planted our ladders about 15 feet from the shore at the first drop’s edge. Now Casey is a big ‘ol boy, but it’s height not girth. He’s 6’8”, and Kris (who’s 5’4”) distrusted his awareness of relativity. He did ok though, and she never drowned nor even dunked, much. Casey said that the key to excellent ladder placement was to never wade out past his wader belt, which was not quite to the top of Kris’s waders.
When we fished, we first climbed the ladder, and then cast out 30 feet or so to get beyond the drop to the feeding fish. There be monsters. When there were no fish in the first hours, Casey had me prospect with streamers on a sinking line. I’d let the line sink and then retrieve with short strips. Other than that we fished nymphs under fluorescent Screw-Ball Indicators. Casey said that streamers are generally fished in the fall, and nymphs are fished the rest of the season, and we fished big weighted nymphs: mahalos, holographic midges, red red and more red chironomids. Ok, they weren’t always red, just mostly.
There was no real retrieve on the nymphs. The shifting lake current and the wind carried the indicator and nymphs through a drift, and from time to time you might give the line a twitch to jig the flies or an up-current mend to get slack out of your line. Sometimes the drift went left to right, sometimes right to left, sometimes straight toward you. Then you’d cast and watch the drift again. Then you’d cast and watch the drift again. Then you’d do all of that some more. It was oddly mesmerizing, watching the bobber work through the waves.
If the fishing is on then the fish take is quick and strong. Casey said that when you see the indicator go down, that with a really large fish there will be no retrieve: it’s a full stop, like hooking a rock that commences a fight.
I fished a lot of different rods, mostly 7-weights, some of ours, some of Casey’s. I fished for a while with Casey’s 11-foot two-handed rod using roll casts, and Casey said that Spey rods and switch rods were pretty much all he personally uses on the lake anymore. I liked it for a bit, but then got distracted and my roll cast went to play the slots back in Reno. I went back to single-handed rods. I’m better at daydreaming with single hand rods.
I asked Kris if we needed to go back to Nevada to catch her a fish. So far she’s caught fish everywhere I’ve caught fish except Mississippi and Nevada, but Nevada is a strange place, and it was a hard trip for a long weekend. I think she’s decided that this fish in every state business is mine, not hers, and while she likes going along she doesn’t need to catch a fish. I still need to go to Oxford, Mississippi though, even though I caught a fish in Mississippi. She didn’t catch a fish in Mississippi, but I could use that as an excuse to go again. Maybe Nevada falls into the same category.
From The Great Train Robbery, 1903, directed by Edwin S. Porter.
This is a blog post with footnotes. [1]
Reno Fly Shop has a podcast, and it’s good. It’s an interview format with some national fly fishing personalities and some Nevada or California locals with local knowledge. The episodes are each about an hour, which is just right for my morning stumble around Rice. The host, the shop owner Jim Litchfield, is a generous and engaged interviewer, but the podcast always gets around to Pyramid Lake and the Truckee River. That can be a bit of a stretch for some of the national fly fishing personalities, so the locals have a decided advantage.
A recent podcast was with Meredith McCord, who is not local to Reno, but like me is from Houston. She spoke at Texas Fly Fishers last year. I don’t know her, but from the audience Ms. McCord seems lively and personable, with a Southern Girl’s penchant for girly casual wear and plenty of well-coiffed hair. She also has a penchant for IGFA records.
The IGFA is the International Game Fish Association, which apparently exists to keep lists of world records and establish rules for catching big fish. Like fly fishing competitions, it has little to do with the rest of us.
On the podcast Ms. McCord was talking about her IGFA records–she holds about 9,000. [2] The talk on the podcast sooner or later got around to IGFA records for cutthroat trout, all of which are from Pyramid Lake. The IGFA doesn’t differentiate among subspecies of cutthroat trout, a cutthroat is a cutthroat is a cutthroat, so a westslope cutthroat from a tiny stream in Montana is in the same swimsuit competition as a massive Lahontan, and it’s no contest. On the other hand there are male and female records, not differentiated by the gender of the fish but by the gender of the angler. I’m pretty sure the records are kept separate so that a boy won’t need to feel bad about being beat up by a girl.
Following are the women’s records for cutthroat:
IGFA Women’s Fly Fishing Records for Cutthroat
If reports are right and ten- to 20-pound Lahontan cutthroat trout are reasonably common at Pyramid Lake, then these records are ready to be broken. [3] Even I could probably land a trout a bit bigger than two pounds on 20 pound tippet. Of course I’d have to change my self-identification, and nobody makes that kind of decision just to catch a fish.
Looking at the list, the second column is the problem. The second column represents a recent rule change that requires a minimum weight for record fish based on the weight of the tippet. The change was adopted after some records were already set, which is why some of the cells are blank: one way or another those records met the new rule requirement. The rule change might attest to the sportsmanship of IGFA rulemakers, but I suspect it probably goes more to the credibility of a 1 lb 12 oz fish being the record cutthroat for 16 pound tippet.
The change requires that for a fish to establish a record, it must weigh at least half of the weight class of the tippet. [4] You don’t put a bantam weight in the ring with a heavyweight and still call things sporting. Of course there’s a four pound tippet class for tarpon, and catching a 100 pound tarpon on a four pound tippet seems more like needless cruelty than sport, so, like I said, credibility is a better explanation than sportsmanship.
Because many of the women’s cutthroat records are oddly low, Pyramid Lake is prime for new records, particularly for women. Listening to Meredith McCord in the podcast I started wondering if Kris would like a record of her own.
The tackle side of establishing records is pretty straightforward. You can fish with any kind of rod as long as it is at least six feet long and is generally recognized as a fly rod. An Orvis Practicaster probably doesn’t cut it, but anything else sold as a fly rod is probably fine. Same goes for reels. [5]Your line can be any kind of fly line and backing. Really the tackle rule comes down to this: if you’re using tackle that’s generally recognized as a fly rod, reel, and line, then from (a) inside the knot attaching your leader to the tippet to (b) inside the knot attaching your tippet to your hook, your class tippet, the one that tests 2 or 4 or 16 or 20 pounds, has to be at least 15 inches long. That’s pretty much it: at least 15 inches inside the knots. It can be longer, but it can’t be shorter. [6]
Now once you sort out the whole gear thing, the conduct thing [7], and the species identification thing [8], you get to the real problems: the weight and length thing, and the fly thing.
Notwithstanding that I’ve got this whole list going on of fish-I-caught, I’m not a particularly ambitious angler. I want to catch a fish in Kansas, but in Kansas I’d be perfectly happy if it was a six-ounce sunfish. I also understand that from the fish’s perspective fishing is a pretty cruel thing to do. I’m not going to stop fishing, but all in all I want to play a fish quick and get it back in the water so that it can go on about its business of killing and eating stuff and fish sex. I’d kill a fish and eat it, but I don’t really like to clean fish. I’d just as soon put the fish back.
But when I put them back I want them to survive, and our notions of how to handle fish for fish survival are evolving. There are the great guidelines from KeepEmWet Fishing, most of which involve keeping the fish wet, using a net, using barbless hooks, and reducing handling.
Ernest Hemingway and family with four marlins, 1935, Bimini, Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston, Massachusetts, Public Domain.
I’ve assumed that IGFA records were all established with dead fish, and that’s not right. While there’s nothing I see in the IGFA rules that prohibits killing fish, IGFA is a partner of KeepEmWet, and has adopted its own rules, guidelines really, for releasing fish. [9] However good the angler, and however good the angler’s intentions, [10] establishing a record requires handling, and there’s a tension between any handling and keeping a fish alive. The IGFA has established procedures for handling and weighing fish aimed at release, and the pictures in my head of dangling dead fish are wrong, or at least unnecessary to establish a record. [11] Still, all in all, all of this folderol seems a lot of trouble, and I’d just as soon not bother. If sometime Kris wants a record, I’ll surely help, but I don’t think I’ll mention it to her. Don’t you mention it to her either.
In addition to the weight thing, there’s the fly thing. Saltwater anglers hate the 12 inch bite tippet regulation [12], which according to rumor is too short to effectively deal with tarpon. For freshwater anglers, the really dumb part of the IGFA rules is a prohibition against droppers. [13] Only single flies are allowed, one supposes to discourage snagging, but really? It’s not like fishing droppers isn’t one of those things done since Dame Juliana Berners, and everybody fishes at least tandem flies when they nymph. The last known person to fish a single nymph was in 2006, and that was only because he’d lost his dropper in a tree. From what I can tell all fishing in Pyramid Lake involves dropper-rigged nymph fishing or streamers, and the practice is to fish tandem streamers. The IGFA rule is inconsistent with how anybody fishes, and I’m not setting any records until the rule is changed. Hah! Showed them. Let them defend their vaunted credibility now.
The Booke of haukynge, huntyng and fysshyng, with all necessary properties and medicines that are to be kept, Tottel, 1561, http://www.luminarium.org/renascence-editions/berners/berners.html
[1] Lawyers love footnotes of all things. Some of the best stuff is always in the footnotes. I wish I could figure out how the text notation could jump to the footnote, and vice versa, but I can’t, so there you are. If you want to read the footnotes you’ll just have to do it manually. Sorry.
[2] Ms. McCord holds a lot of records, but I made up the number 9000. It just sounded good.
[3] IGFA measures things by kilograms, but I skipped straight to the stateside pound translation. If you want to get back to the IGFA designation a kilogram equals 2.2046 pounds.
[4] If you’re paying close attention, this is probably confusing because the chart gives the minimum weight for 16 pound tippet at 8 pounds, 14 ounces. Even by my low math standards that is more than half of the weight of the 16 pound tippet class. That’s because the IGFA doesn’t use good ol’ American tippet, but some kind of European stuff measured at 8 kilograms. The 16 pounds is an approximation of eight kilograms. Eight kilograms weighs more than 16 pounds. Who knew?
[5] The exact language of the reel rule is as follows: “The reel must be designed expressly for fly fishing. There are no restrictions on gear ratio or type of drag employed except where the angler would gain an unfair advantage. Electric or electronically operated reels are prohibited.” I guess that you couldn’t use a Tenkara rod because the reel for the rod isn’t expressly designed for fly fishing. Maybe someone could argue that the absence of the reel was expressly designed for fly fishing, and that counts for reel design. This is a shame, since I reckon that all of the saltwater Tenkara anglers are out there right now trying to beat the record for sailfish.
[6] At this point you should be asking yourself how the heck do I know that my leader actually tests at that weight? There are pre-tested tippet spools you can buy from companies like Courtland, which should provide consistent break points over the length of the line. This differs from how most of us buy tippet, which actually has less to do with the break strength than the tippet diameter. We don’t really care if our .015 diameter tippet measures a bit more than 8 lbs over its length. Record setters do, and you have to send your leader and tippet in for testing with your record application. You’d think these IGFA people think that fishers are all liars, or at least poor judges of their catch.
[7] This is gross over-simplification, but the conduct rules pretty much come down to catch the fish as you normally would, don’t actually shoot it, and except for netting or gaffing in the final stage, don’t let anybody help you land the fish.
[8] Take lots of pictures of the whole fish. Take pictures of the fish from every conceivable angle. If there’s going to be any doubt of the fish’s species, The IGFA recommends you take the fish to your nearest ichthyologist for identification. I kid you not. A photo has to show the full length of the fish. A photo has to show the rod and reel used to the catch the fish. I think a photo has to show the scale used to weigh the fish, and I think I’d send in a photo of the scale in the very act of weighing the fish. Scales are notorious liars, as anybody with a bathroom scale knows.
[9] One supposes best practices for keeping fish alive doesn’t include taking the fish to the nearest certified scale. The scale certification rules confuse me, but I gather that the best scales are spring scales—not digital as one would expect—and that Boga grips are considered good scales, but not good fish handling devices if you’re using them to hang fish up by the lips. Lip hanging is both hard on the fish’s jaw and on their internal organs, which will come as a shock to us largemouth bass anglers. IGFA will pre-certify your scale for a charge and a membership fee, or will certify the scale after the fact. Then of course you run the risk of having used a bad scale, plus you still have to pay the membership fee.
[10] Now if I were a particularly devious sort of record chaser, and I’d caught a record fish, then I might conclude that if I release a fish and it lives long and prospers, then somebody could break my hard won record next year with the same fish. I don’t know how the minds of record chasers work, so maybe none are that sort of devious.
[11] Apparently the best way to weigh a fish is in a cradle or a net, so you have to establish the weight of the sling or net and subtract it. I’ve got no idea what the IGFA requires to establish the weight of the sling or net.
[12] In addition to the class tippet rule there is also a special rule for bite tippet, which is important for fish like tarpon. That’s a whole other discussion. Twelve inches.
[13] If you’ve read down to this footnote, and you don’t know what a dropper is, then I’m a more engaging writer than I thought I was, or you’re one of my children and you’re humoring me. If you think about fly #1 tied to a fly line, and then fly #2 tied to a piece of line tied to the hook bend of fly #1, fly #2 is the dropper. The whole thing together is a dropper rig.
