To explore the cultures of fishing, Louv joined a bass tournament on Lake Erie and got a casting lesson from fly-fishing legend Joan Wulff He angled with corporate executives in Montana and fly-fished for sharks in California. He spent time with fishing-boat captains in Florida, the regulars who fish New York City's Hudson River, and a river witch in Colorado. He teamed secrets of fishing and living from steelheaders in the Northwest, Bass'n Gals in Texas, and an ice-fisher in the North Woods. Along the way, he heard from one of Hemingway's sons what it was like to fish with Papa and from Robert Kennedy, Jr., how fishing changed his fife.
As he describes the eccentricities, obsessions, and tribulations of dedicated anglers, he also uncovers the values that unite them. He reveals the healing qualities of fishing, how it binds the generations, how the angling business has grown, and how the future of fishing is threatened. But most of all, Fly-Fishing for Sharks is about the unforgettable characters Louv meets on the water and the stories they tell. From them, Louv learns about our changing relationship with nature, about a hidden America — and about himself.
To explore the cultures of fishing, Louv joined a bass tournament on Lake Erie and got a casting lesson from fly-fishing legend Joan Wulff He angled with corporate executives in Montana and fly-fished for sharks in California. He spent time with fishing-boat captains in Florida, the regulars who fish New York City's Hudson River, and a river witch in Colorado. He teamed secrets of fishing and living from steelheaders in the Northwest, Bass'n Gals in Texas, and an ice-fisher in the North Woods. Along the way, he heard from one of Hemingway's sons what it was like to fish with Papa and from Robert Kennedy, Jr., how fishing changed his fife.
As he describes the eccentricities, obsessions, and tribulations of dedicated anglers, he also uncovers the values that unite them. He reveals the healing qualities of fishing, how it binds the generations, how the angling business has grown, and how the future of fishing is threatened. But most of all, Fly-Fishing for Sharks is about the unforgettable characters Louv meets on the water and the stories they tell. From them, Louv learns about our changing relationship with nature, about a hidden America — and about himself.
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Overview
To explore the cultures of fishing, Louv joined a bass tournament on Lake Erie and got a casting lesson from fly-fishing legend Joan Wulff He angled with corporate executives in Montana and fly-fished for sharks in California. He spent time with fishing-boat captains in Florida, the regulars who fish New York City's Hudson River, and a river witch in Colorado. He teamed secrets of fishing and living from steelheaders in the Northwest, Bass'n Gals in Texas, and an ice-fisher in the North Woods. Along the way, he heard from one of Hemingway's sons what it was like to fish with Papa and from Robert Kennedy, Jr., how fishing changed his fife.
As he describes the eccentricities, obsessions, and tribulations of dedicated anglers, he also uncovers the values that unite them. He reveals the healing qualities of fishing, how it binds the generations, how the angling business has grown, and how the future of fishing is threatened. But most of all, Fly-Fishing for Sharks is about the unforgettable characters Louv meets on the water and the stories they tell. From them, Louv learns about our changing relationship with nature, about a hidden America — and about himself.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780743200257 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Simon & Schuster |
| Publication date: | 07/17/2001 |
| Pages: | 496 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.30(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One: It Changes Everything
When you're fly-fishing for sharks, the line between lunacy and sanity is pretty thin. Twelve miles off the San Diego coast, former grunge rocker Conway Bowman stopped the eighteen-foot aluminum boat with the upswept bow. The sea lifted us. We were just beyond the bank where the Pacific Ocean's floor plummets from fifty fathoms to three hundred, where an upwell brings food to the surface.
Sharks like it here. Conway likes it here.
At thirty, he's a handsome guy, lean and hard and tan, with a three-day stubble and closely cut hair. He wore a fleece jacket, khaki shorts, tennis shoes, Orvis sunglasses, and a wide straw hat. He was excited and intent, couldn't wait to get out there, but he forced himself to stay within the bay speed limit. The motor growled. We passed a lolling cigarette boat.
"More gauges than a spaceship," he said, squinting at it.
Several kayakers were leaning into the offshore wind and heading out to sea. Some kayakers paddle five miles out with their fishing gear to catch giant sea bass. Sometimes they're joined by even hardier breeds, belly boaters — anglers suspended in fancy inner tubes — and surfboard anglers. Like the kayakers, the surfboard anglers paddle out in their wet suits, rod held in their teeth, a fanny pack around their waist to hold lures and snippers. These anglers favor kelp forests or the floating kelp beds that break away in storms or are chewed loose from their rock anchors by sea urchins; the beds attract yellowtail, dorado, rockfish, and opaleye. Suspended, feet dangling, the belly-boat and surfboard fishers move above the kelp forest, watch it twine down into darkness. They sit out there all day and sometimes at night, listening to the hissing and popping of life in the kelp.
Here's how extreme it gets. On July 7, 1998, Scot Cherry, a 6 feet 4 inches tall surfboard angler, caught a 140-pound thresher shark while fishing a mile and a half off La Jolla. It was nearly as long as Cherry's 13-foot longboard. During the forty-five-minute fight, the shark towed Cherry for five miles at about 10 knots — fast enough to create a wake behind the board. Cherry's ambition is to surf behind a shark.
Compared to these anglers, Conway seems...conservative.
Over the noise of the engine and the pounding of the hull, Conway described his earliest memories, which were of fishing.
I remember my father, this big man walking into the kitchen with albacore as long as his leg. I'd watch the way he cleaned the fish with authority. I'd sit on the floor and just look at him.We'd go fishing every weekend. He'd get me up when it was still dark. The mornings always smelled like pipe tobacco. I remember his Ford Falcon, and his hat, and his red checkered Filson jacket, and his boots. I still have those boots. He didn't use them anymore, so I just took them. Up until a few years ago, I used to wear them when I fished. They're in my closet now.
I must have been about three years old. It was a very cold February day. My father and I were out fishing on Lake Jennings, and I remember he had on this big white coat with a big woolen collar. He was sitting there baiting my hook and he threw it out and we were using cheese bait. I got hit. He set the hook, and handed the rod back to me, and I'm reeling and reeling. It was a large trout. I was really excited and so was he. He went down and took it off the hook and put it on a stringer and put it in the water, turned around, and I went into the water after the fish. Just to play with it, you know.
This was the middle of February, it was probably thirty-two degrees out. I remember him getting into the water and just taking me, you know, and running me up to the car and putting me in the car and taking me home. With the fish of course.
Conway pushed the throttle and lifted the Bayrunner bow over the first swells outside the bay. We were headed out into the high rolling sea now. My fourteen-year-old son Jason was with us. He was wearing dark glasses, a black tee shirt, and a kind of seasick scowl. In recent months, he and I had been having difficulty talking for the first time since he was little. Perhaps a little fly-fishing for sharks would help. Something new for both of us.
Still, I had not realized that the boat would be this...small.
We watched delicate, silver fish skim through the tops of the waves next to the boat. A morning chop like this usually gives way to smooth seas once you get farther out. Off on the sea, dark shapes, like quarter moons, floated above the waves, down and up, down and up.
"Porpoise," said Conway, smiling. "They'll come right at us."
"Look at 'em, Jason," I said to my quiet son. "There must be what, fifteen?"
"We can probably hear them," said Conway.
He turned off the engine. We heard nothing. "Sometimes it takes five minutes for the whole school to go through. That was a small school. When pilot whales pass by, you can hear them through the aluminum hull — their high squeal." The arc of the world moved up and then down, and up again. He held a Magellan-Meridian Excel Global Positioning System on which he had programmed the hot spots for sharks, the coordinates of his sightings since January. These were marked by flags on the screen. After a few minutes of drifting silently, listening, he started the engine again and we moved out.
He stood, watching intently. "We're looking for signs of life: bait fish, birds on top of the bait fish, even subtle irregularities in the surface, which could, for instance, signal puddling yellowtail tuna — "
"What do you mean, puddling?"
"They're just kind of up, slurping on the surface. So you're constantly watching for that. Also, you're reading the water. For instance, right in front of us, you see this slick?" Not the oil slick, he said, but a slight change in the texture of the water beyond it, a smoothing. "It's a current break. Fish like current breaks. Usually in a current break, on either side, there's a temperature difference and you always want to fish the warmer side of it. So you're always looking for things like that. These details usually will guide you right to the fish."
He cut the engine again. We were nine miles out. Land was a thin strip of memory. We floated above the inner edge of the Nine Mile Bank, where the depth drops abruptly from fifty fathoms to three hundred; the current far below hits a mountainside and shoots upward, producing an upwelling of water that disgorges biomass — concentrated plant and animal life — from the deep and splays it out along the surface. The biomass attracts smaller fish, and these draw larger predators.
We'll fish here, Conway said, and drift to twelve miles out.
From the front of the slowly pitching boat, he hauled out a crate of commercial "Shark and Fish Chum" and tied it to the back corner of the boat. The top edge was only inches from the water, and when the bow lifted, the stern dipped close to the surface. The box had holes in it, from which bits of fish and fish oil oozed and created a lengthening, widening slick behind us. As the boat drifted, the bluish sheen spread out over the green troughs and moved up and over the edge of the swells and disappeared.
Conway loves to come out here alone in the cool mist and chum the water and wait and then stand on the heaving center console as eight- and ten-foot blue sharks circle. His fly line floating in long fluid loops, he casts to the most aggressive sharks.
Conway makes his living supervising recreation on a nearby city reservoir, but hopes to be one of the first guides on the West Coast to make a living taking anglers out to fly-fish for sharks. This is how fishing cultures get started, by the passion of one angler.
What is it about fishing that attracts you? I asked.
"I don't know, I think it's the tranquillity of it, just being on the water. The water really has something to do with it. Also, the freedom. I fish by myself much of the time. I think it's just me, getting away maybe. I don't know, some people say it's an escape. All the girlfriends I've had — 'You're just escaping from reality' — or something like that. But I'm most happy here."
I told him I always think of it as escaping to reality.
"Exactly!" he said, grinning. "That's the way I look at it." He pulled out another white bucket filled with chunks of mackerel and sliced them into smaller pieces. On most trips, he catches his own mackerel, but today he was in a hurry, and used the commercial bait. "I think it's the freedom, the sense of accomplishment. Fishing makes you feel worthy, it makes me feel worthy."
Why worthy?
"You've done something, you've actually...I don't know how to describe it."
The slick stretched out behind us, widening. "Sometimes in the chunk slick, when there's a lot of birds, it means there's going to be a lot of sharks. They usually don't catch the birds but they do go after their feet."
Sharks are attracted to minute currents that come from the reaction of certain metals in contact with one another. The electrical impulses likely mimic the spark of life that means food in the shark's world. So Conway places a zinc plate on the bottom of the metal boat. "It causes some kind of energy that really gets them going," he said. The smallest sharks come in first, followed by the larger sharks, which often arrive a couple hours into the fishing. He wanted to slow the boat's drift, so he tossed out a driftback — a kind of water-dragging parachute.
The slick deepened in color.
"People have a preconceived notion that sharks are vicious. Well, not really. Not most of them. Not the blue sharks. Fishing for blues is actually very much like catfishing, which I like to do, too. You sit, you do a lot of pondering. But then you see them coming, which is different from catfishing."
As we waited, he rigged the rods. He uses what he calls chunk flies, simple attractors that imitate (purist fly-fishers will not be impressed) the pieces of fish we were throwing behind us. Usually he sight-casts to the first sharks coming in, before they get to the chum bucket attached to the boat. If they reach the chum bucket they become spoiled by the ease of it. Because the day was overcast, it would be difficult to sight-cast.
A fin cut the water with a distinctive hiss.
"They're early," he said. Usually, the sharks take forty-five minutes or so to show up, but there was something different about this day. Five or six blue sharks, four to five feet long, circled us. One glided up to the boat, stuck its head out of the water, bared its teeth in a hideous smile, and proceeded to gnaw on the top of the chum box. The surface of the water was only a few inches from the top of the boat's stern railing, and the sharks were only a few feet away — this one was less than two feet from my leg.
Conway handed me an oily chum bucket and instructed Jason and me to begin flinging the finger-sized chunks of fish into the sea.
Then he froze. "We have a situation here," he said.
"What do you mean situation?" I said.
"We have a mako."
Something about the way he said mako made me want to be home watching a National Geographic special.
As Conway took a 12-weight flyrod from a vertical rod holder, he explained why he considered this a situation. The slender, deep-water blue shark can be dim-witted, almost passive — like a catfish that wouldn't mind having you for dinner. But the powerful mako, or mackerel shark, which can grow to over twelve feet and one thousand pounds, slices through the water like a jet fighter at speeds that sometimes exceed sixty miles per hour. When hooked, a mako tends to fly out of the water into a boat, jaws snapping: Jumps of twenty to thirty feet have been recorded. Essentially, the mako is a smaller version of the great white shark, but more aggressive.
Conway practices catch-and-release for ecological as well as safety reasons. "You do not want one of these fish in the boat with you," he said dryly. Thirty-two attacks on humans — and fifteen boat attacks — have been recorded, not a big number, unless you're in the number. He told us of one angler who had met his mako this way. "He had the shark hooked; it ran to sea then turned around and charged back, flew into the boat, and bit the fisherman's thigh. Cut the femoral artery. The guy bled to death in twenty minutes."
Makos, in their way, don't get mad. They get even. A few years ago, a ten-foot mako jumped out of the water and into the boat of a sixty-nine-year-old Fijian fisher. "Immediately, the shark proceeded to eat the fisherman," according to a newspaper report. "His five stunned shipmates tried to kill the shark, but were unable to either stop the attack or remove the shark from both the boat and their friend in time." Another, larger mako attacked a crew of four Fijians. "That crew was unable to remove the shark because of various injuries inflicted upon all of the boat's occupants."
The mako circling us was nearly six feet long. "Are you ready?" said Conway. "This is the ultimate fish on the flyrod. This is the first one I've seen out here. Look at him go! Look at him go!"
He handed me the flyrod.
"No, you do the first cast. It's your record." After Conway's stories, I wasn't too sure I wanted to hook the thing anyway.
"Jesus, can I?" he said, laughing.
"Of course! What do you mean, can you? Of course. It's your boat."
Conway's hands were trembling. His face had lost its ruddy color. If he caught this fish, he believed he would be the first fly-fisher to catch a mako off San Diego.
He lifted the rod and flipped a three-inch fly in front of the shark.
The fin hissed past, slicing the slick, the nose of the thing at a slight downward angle. It looked and swam nothing like the blues. It looked...mechanical, streamlined like a torpedo. The mako's back was bluish gray with an odd golden-brown reflection on top, gray on the sides, with a flashing white belly.
The fish was not eating, but cruising slowly, watching. If the mako became agitated enough, Conway explained, it would take one of the blue sharks. "If the blue is chewing the chum box or on a fly line, the mako will come up and bite its tail off and then eat him." This mako seemed meditative, focused. It made a wide arc and disappeared. Our hands were bloody from the chum, but none of us would wash them in the seawater.
Jason was standing at the bow of the boat, watching from behind his sunglasses. I was glad he was there, instead of at the stern. But I did not want to show my concern, just as, I am sure, he did not wish to show his. In fact, this felt good. It felt terrific, and probably not as much of a situation as Conway was making it out to be.
The shark returned, swerved past the boat, skimming the surface. I stepped back from the side of the boat.
Conway raised the fly above his head and back, and looped the line out over the water. It landed in the slick and moved with the swell. The little blue shark shimmied up to the fly and bumped it with his nose, which was good, said Conway, because it could agitate the mako. This was the moment of truth.
The mako paused just under the surface, ten feet from us. Suspicious, perhaps. Conway pulled the chum fly from the water and cast again, dropped it a few feet ahead of the shark as it made a small turn away from us. The mako slid two feet forward, its dorsal fin out of the water, opened its mouth slightly.
The fly disappeared.
Conway pulled the tip of his rod high in the air. Nothing. The shark had effortlessly bitten through the steel leader and taken the fly with it.
Rather than tie on a new fly, Conway quickly returned the 12-weight flyrod to the holder and picked out a lighter, 9-weight rod with chum fly already rigged. He did not expect the mako to return, but he wanted to be ready. He said the shark's run had been perfect because it was headed away from the boat, at an angle. He told me that if he hooked the mako, I would have to pilot the boat — and chase the shark on fast runs of seventy-five to one hundred yards, and prepare for it to leap clear of the water like a marlin or swordfish. Conway's tackle was too light to bring the fish in directly.
Now the ocean seemed empty. The little blues had disappeared. We were drifting fast, nearly to the twelve-mile point, which may have explained the blues' behavior. The boat lifted on a swell, settled in a trough.
Then suddenly the mako was in front of us, three feet off the stern. It slipped around the corner, now inches from the boat. Conway dropped the fly in front of it. The shark moved forward.
Just before it could take the fly, he pulled up on his rod.
The fly dangled in the air. The mako flashed out of sight. This time for good.
Why had he thrown away his opportunity, his chance to establish a record — to reach his goal?
"Too dangerous," he whispered. His voice was still excited, but with an edge of disappointment. "I couldn't do it. The shark was too close to the boat. It was too dangerous, especially with your son on board." Besides, he added, hooking a fish inches from the boat just wouldn't seem...right.
He turned the boat, and, with the engine grinding, we moved back to the nine-mile edge of the drop-off, stopped, and began the drift again. Conway looked up at the overcast, which was thickening, and felt the stiffening wind. If the wind increased, we would return. His boat was too small to handle large swells.
The blues came up to the new chum slick, and Conway handed the 9-weight to my son. Jason flipped the chum fly to a cruising blue, which took it, and Jason hauled it in, a look of sudden lightning in his usually quiet eyes. The shark, a kind of charcoal blue, shot this way and that and rolled frantically. Conway reached down with a thickly gloved hand, grabbed the fifteen-or sixteen-pound blue just behind its head, and twisted it out of the water. Its mouth was open wide, flashing, and Conway took a pair of pliers in his other hand and unhooked the fish.
"Did you like that, Jason?"
"Yeah. It was okay." He was grinning despite himself. So was I.
Conway handed me a rod, and I caught a blue. Conway usually unhooks them quickly in the water but this time, for each of us, he pulled a fish out of the water and held it up, its teeth flashing, and we posed for photographs, all of us smiling, feeling alive.
Hooking the mako had changed things. Now the waves had an added snap to them, serrated white ridges along their tops, and the wind was coming up. As we packed the gear, returned the rods to the upright holder, hauled in the chum box, he said he realized that some fly-fishers, the purists at least, look down their noses at fly-fishing for sharks, at flies tied to look like chunks of flesh.
"There's so much emphasis on being correct and perfect, on wearing the right clothes and using the right equipment. What I like about fishing for sharks is that it's very basic — maybe the most basic form of fly-fishing you can do, even more basic than pan fishing with a fly-rod, because there's basically only one choice of fly. And maybe it seems more...primitive. You're sight-fishing, you're hunting."
And then he told me about one of his fishing dreams. "I've always thought about opening a fly shop, a different kind of fly shop." His eyes drifted off to the towers of the approaching urban skyline. "I'd have good outdoor literature in it. It would be a tackle shop, a bookstore, and a coffee shop also. It might even have its own microbrewery. Beer and coffee and fishing. Maybe a bagel or two. People would sit around and tell lies about their fishing. Not just go in, buy something, and get the hell out, but stick around, have some coffee, work at a fly-tying bench, tie flies, and tell some lies. Some good stories."
Hey, I said, you could call it "Flybucks."
"Well, it wouldn't just be about bucks. It would be about something that the fishing writer Russell Chatham said: It would be about going somewhere you didn't have to kiss one undeserving ass that you didn't have to."
Conway headed his little boat toward the thin line of smog and shore.
As the boat entered the bay, and he throttled down, he talked about second thoughts: how he wished he had taken the mako. "Silly, but when I first saw the mako, I felt kind of...threatened. He made me feel very uneasy when I saw him coming on to the line. The mako cocked his head to one side, looked at the boat, almost like he was saying, 'What are you doing in my area?' He has no enemies, you know, except us. And we have him."
In the months since our trip, Conway has returned often to the upwell. He's pursuing his dream, slowly moving away from his city job and out to sea, into the role of charter captain. He told me recently how he took a friend out fishing, and the friend, seasick, leaned over the edge and personally chummed the water just as a seven-foot mako roared by.
"That was a big fish," said his friend.
Conway decided then and there to buy a bigger boat.
He finally hooked and caught a mako on a flyrod — a six-foot, one-hundred-pound shark. A friend piloted the boat. They chased the fish for an hour. Conway brought the mako in and quickly released it, so the record remained unofficial. And then he sat down, knees shaking.
Copyright © 2000 by Richard Louv
Table of Contents
ContentsIntroduction: Shop Talk
Headwaters
It Changes Everything
The Lost World
Fish Eyes and Lizard Legs
Flyover Waters
You See That?
Mall Fishing
The Contender
The Contest
Sex and the Bass'n Gals
Hidden Waters
Whitefish Willy and the Northern Lights
Ice Flying
Poaching the King's Fish
Flywaters
True Story
Relics
The Fishermom
Industrial-Strength Fly-Fishing
Lodge Life
Fishing with Papa
Ghostwaters
Nick Raven and the River of Heaven
River Witching
The Giveaway
Fishing for Ghosts (or, Sasquatch of the Stilly)
City Waters
A Trout Grows in Brooklyn
Down the Potomac
Saltwaters
Captains of Florida
Bring Me the Head of Osceola
Renewing Waters
Murky Waters: The Morality of Fishing
Fishing with Bobby
Moving On
Notes
Index
What People are Saying About This
Like John Steinbeck, who took his dog Charley on a trip to discover America some forty years ago, Richard Louv set out on a similar journey using an investigation into our fishing culture as his guide. The result is a series of tales-sometimes surprising, sometimes humorous, and sometimes touching. . . this book [is] not only immensely entertaining, but enlightening, for Louv is not only a skilled writer, he is a thoughtful one. And there is, in this age of skepticism and suspicion, something very refreshing about a book motivated by such generosity of spirit and kindly curiosity.
— author of The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer: A Biography
Here’s a book about fishing that is for people who do not fish...That’s because its real subject is people, not fish. There are stories and experiences and laughs-and even a little philosophy-here for everyone. Enjoy!
—The News Hour, PBS
Michael Levy The Buffalo News I am blown away....The best book of armchair angling to hit the shelves in years.
Jim Lehrer The News Hour, PBS Here's a book about fishing for people who do not fish....That's because its real subject is people.
Elizabeth Grossman Chicago Tribune An enlightening glimpse into the world of piscatorial pleasures and what evokes such passion in its enthusiasts.
Christopher Camuto Gray's Sporting Journal Through his travels, Louv becomes a kind of Studs Terkel of the fishing world....Makes me proud to be an American.
Introduction
Introduction: Shop Talk
One way or another, we're all anglers.
On a Saturday afternoon before lighting out for the territories, I stopped at Stroud Tackle to see my friends Bill and Eileen Stroud and John Bowman. As usual, I needed the atmosphere more than the gear.
My plan for the next couple of years was to take a new look at my country -- through the unique prism of fishing.
Stopping at the tackle store seemed like a good place to start.
Now in its twenty-eighth year, Stroud Tackle is located in a bland stucco building on San Diego's Morena Boulevard. The shop is bracketed by cut-rate furniture outlets, a massage-equipment-and-lotions store, and a building contractor's office. All of this is bathed in freeway noise and jet fumes from nearby Lindbergh Field, and Southern California sun. Walk in from the street, out of that harsh light and sun, let the door swing closed behind you, hear the little bell ring, and you enter another world.
The shop is calming, a refuge from the chaos outside. Flecks of dust glow in thin rays of bright light that splay through the blinds. Your eyes take a moment to adjust. One wall is dedicated to freshwater fish. Across it you see mounted golden trout, rainbow, cutthroats, brown, lake trout, and a replicated 27.4-pound steelhead, sleek and shiny -- the state record steelhead caught on a fly, from the Smith River in Northern California.
Everything's a little dusty, as if the fish have been freeze-dried in the arc of their jump, and then shellacked. Bill and Eileen look a little bit like that, too.
The shop's back wall is given over to saltwater fish: halibut, bat ray, marlin, opah, amberjack, sheephead, yellowfin tuna, dolphin, roosterfish, jack mackerel, white sea bass, wahoo, dorado, yellowtail, bonefish, sharks (bonita, tiger, dusky, blue). Until recently, a baby hammerhead shark sat on the counter on a pedestal, but Eileen took him home. She was afraid someone would steal him.
These days, many fishermen consider it more reasonable and correct to photograph their catch, release it, and send the photo off for replication in three-dimensional plastic and paint. But these fish, sixty of them, once moved through green and blue, through kelp and lily pad, through life.
I look around. The mere stuff of the store is comforting, all this medicating paraphernalia: hand-tied flies (these days, 90 percent of them tied in Sri Lanka or Colombia or Kenya or some other developing country); Orvis, 3-M, Lamson, and Ross single-action, click and pawl and disk drag reels of Orvis; and Sage, Thomas & Thomas, Scott, Loomis rods, all graphite. Bamboo rods are back in vogue, not because they catch more fish, but because of how they make the angler feel. Special. Elite. Part of a tradition. Bill and Eileen do not carry bamboo rods, because, as Eileen explains, "they're so expensive, one thousand to twenty-five hundred dollars, and the last one I had got stolen here, right out of the store."
Such a theft makes no sense. "Think how you'd feel fishing with a stolen bamboo rod. Kind of defeats the purpose." Or, she says, maybe the thief just sold it. "The latest thing is guys come in here with Scotch tape wrapped around their hands, sticky side out. They run their hands through the fly box, and the flies stick to the tape underneath their hand."
"Next time I see that happen," says Bill, peering over his glasses, "I'm going up to that guy, close his fingers into a fist, and shake his hand real hard."
"I tell you," Eileen says, "fishing is changing."
The room, only 850 square feet, is packed like, well, a sardine can. Eileen and Bill, both in their seventies, stand behind the counter. Eileen learned to fly-fish as a child, from her father. She does not talk readily of this, but I hope some day to hear her stories. I do know that she is reputed to be a better angler than Bill, and better still than most of the fishers who come into this shop.
Bill, tall, white-haired, a former big-time New York City insurance salesman, stares at you over his glasses and scowls and you're home free. If he scowls at you, it means he likes you.
"What can I do for you today, Richard?"
For the next hour or so, he'll try to talk you out of buying anything. "Oh, you don't need that," he'll say. And Eileen, who always hovers next to the cash register as if she's protecting it from him, shoots him a withering look. He doesn't wither easily.
Something about visiting the Strouds, and their volunteer salesman and raconteur, John, is deeply calming to me. Familiar.
I remember the stacks of Field & Stream that one old man, Grandpa Barron, who lived next door, would hand me every few months when I was a boy. These magazines were filled with culture and dreams.
Sometimes before dawn, Grandpa Barron and I would walk down the road to the lake, climb in his boat, and glide across the black water. I would watch his hands in the propane lamplight, as they molded the dough bait, and worked the rod and reel with skill. He said little. He did not preach. He did not pry. He was glad to have some company. In silence, we would watch the mist on the water and the widening rings where fish nosed or tailed into the air.
In those years, the act of fishing, the mantra of it, with or without a catch, was a way to keep from drowning, a way to connect to something larger. But, over time, like a lot of people in need of a little renewal, I had drifted away from that sense of connection, had begun to fish more in theory than in reality. Recently, the meaning of fishing, of life, had seemed tenuous. Late at night, as I skimmed across the American veneer, surfed from channel to channel, I found it difficult to think or to feel clearly. As a journalist, too, the latest crisis seemed pretty much like the one before it.
Stroud Tackle brings back that earlier time and offers affirmation.
On this day, I tell the Strouds and John Bowman about my plan, how I'm setting out to explore the cultures of fishing -- the people and ecologies of angling in America. Trout anglers, bass fishers; seekers of steelhead, sturgeon, shark, and carp; fly-fishers, ice fishers, bass tournament pros, charter captains, guides, lodge owners, and poachers alike. North, South, East, and West -- and of course the Great Midwest. To explore how fishing renews us, and how we can renew fishing by rethinking our roles as stewards.
My modus operandi is simple: identify anglers, legendary and average, men and women, in each of the cultures with something to say about the fishing life and life beyond fishing. They will, I hope, be my Sancho Panzas. With lance (a St. Croix graphite composite rod, bought at Stroud Tackle) in hand, I'll travel to the Meccas of fishing -- Orvis, Bass Pro Shop's Outdoor World, bait shops, and coffee shops. I'll investigate the beliefs and industries of each of these cultures: the ethical frameworks, the dialects and the dialectics; the political pools and the perceptual streams.
"So this means you'll have to go fishing," says Bill.
"Guess so."
"Now there's an assignment." He smiles slowly.
Eileen arches an eyebrow. "I say save your time and money. Forget the writing. Just go fishing."
Behind a second counter, John Bowman, with neatly trimmed white beard and aviator glasses, holds forth. A retired teacher, he spends part of his spare time at the shop, helping out with the customers. Many have been coming here for years. He thinks of himself as the Strouds' concierge.
The bell rings, the anglers walk in out of the light and finger the merchandise, dream a little, and eventually move to the counter. The anglers who come through the door are young and old, male and female; they're construction workers and doctors, the unemployed and the over-employed. Some are novices; a few are even better anglers than John or Bill or Eileen. Others are fashion fishers looking for the latest vest. They ask John about the best places to fish in the West, the lakes and streams and pools of Montana and Idaho and California's Eastern Sierra, which John has fished since his son Conway, now thirty, was eight years old. They ask: Where should we stay? What flies should we use on the Owens?
He crosses his arms, elbows on the glass, and advises them to go deep in the fall, with flies that impersonate underwater larvae: "Use a nine-foot leader with a 16 nymph, either a gold-ribbed hare's ear or a pheasant-tail nymph. From the curve of the nymph's hook, tie on twelve inches of 5x monofilament tippet, and tie that to another nymph pattern, size 20 or 22."
None of this code makes much sense to the new fly-fisher, but John, forever a teacher, will spend all the time it takes to explain.
Angling is now America's favorite outdoor activity. In 1959, according to U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service surveys begun in that year, roughly 20 million fishing licenses were sold in the U.S.; by 1992 the number had jumped to 31 million. In 1998, 44 million Americans fished, according to the National Sporting Goods Association, far exceeding the number of people who participate in tennis or golf. Among men, fishing is far and away the favorite outdoor recreation. But the ranks of women anglers are growing also. Of outdoor activities, fishing now ranks seventh among women.
"Women anglers are not as fashion-conscious as men," John tells me. "Men tend to be into gadgets, but women are usually more interested in the technicalities of fishing; they're really into it. Men are interested in the size of fish they can get, women are more interested in how to fish." Keep your eye on the women, he advises. "More interesting than the men."
Though in some areas of the country the sales of fishing licenses have fallen slightly in recent years -- giving some fishing manufacturers cause for concern -- angling's commercial power overall is impressive, to say the least.
The American Sportfishing Association reports that 35.3 million anglers spent $38 billion on fishing trips and gear in 1996, up from $24 billion in 1991. Ad agencies now employ fishing images to sell everything from booze to bank accounts. "Once considered a cane pole and worm crowd, anglers are now courted aggressively by everyone from General Mills to General Motors," USA Today reports. Wal-Mart put its name on one national pro tour, Kmart latched on to another. Meanwhile, Pepsi and Coke jockeyed for position, and Fuji Film, Rubbermaid, AC Delco, Wrangler, and Citgo signed on with one pro bass outfit or the other. In 1998, fishing truly reached the commercial big time: General Mills announced that the next sports champion to be honored on the front of the Wheaties box would be a bass fisherman.
Fishing is also getting more organized. The sport has spawned myriad organizations, including TROUT Unlimited, which fights to preserve trout habitat; Bass'n Gal (an organization for women bass fishers), which celebrated its twentieth anniversary in 1996 with nearly thirty-three thousand members, and then closed a year later due to sexism, a story told later in this book; and the 660,000-member Bass Anglers Sportsman Society, which sponsors fishing tournaments, produces a cable television bass fishing show, and publishes Bassmaster, Southern Outdoors, and B.A.S.S. Times -- and plans to open Bass Outdoor America, a $50 million family-oriented theme park in Alabama or Tennessee, complete with a bass boat roller-coaster and a sixty-acre lake with an island the shape of a largemouth bass.
Eileen snorts. "Like to see that."
"Now Eileen, different strokes," says Bill.
Part of the reason for this growth is the movie, A River Runs Through It, released in 1992 and based on the Norman Maclean novella about family and trout-fishing in Montana. Also contributing are big-money bass tournament circuits and advertising. But a deeper current moves below the surface: nature hunger. The baby boom generation may be the last one to share an intimate, familial attachment to the land and water. Today, development erases suburbia's last islands and peninsulas of open land and wild water.
But judgments are often premature and mysteries abound. Fishing, as John Bowman says, "is always about more than fishing." Today's fishing is about the tension between commercialism and romanticism, between the growing popularity of angling and limited waters, between past and future, between innocence and knowledge. The waters we fish, and how we fish, reflect larger political, ethical, even spiritual issues. How shall we reconnect to nature? How should we treat fellow creatures of other species? How do we hold fast to what is old, timeless, and slow? If the cultures of fishing begin to communicate and work together -- something they have not done in the past -- could anglers become the most powerful and effective environmental lobby?
I claim no expertise at angling. But I do hope to learn a thing or two about how to catch a fish. I'll explore the cultures of fishing, see a fair bit of my country, and travel its currents. The way I figure it, if you want to know America, go fishing.
I'm eager to get started, but before I leave the shop, I buy a couple of flies from Eileen -- well, more than a couple. Hard to get out of there without loading up, despite Bill's efforts.
"You can tell a lot about people by fishing with 'em. Places, too," says John. Cheerfully defying California law, he lights up his pipe. "Keep in mind that fishing to some people becomes an obsession because it's what Sam is doing, it's what everybody else is doing. It's like when people began wearing bell-bottom trousers -- they wore them because somebody else had them. Keep your eye on the difference between fashion and fishing."
He points the stem of the pipe at me. "Here's my advice. Get out of the country." I laugh. He explains: "A couple hundred miles south of here is a place that will show you what fishing was like before it got...complicated."
He rummages around behind the counter and finds a pencil and a piece of paper and writes down a name and a Baja California, Mexico, phone number. "I'll tell you one thing I like about fishing is it gets me to places where there aren't many people. It's probably the camaraderie, too. Although I know that's a contradiction. Some people think it's a damned religion." He pauses. "I'll be quite frank: It's almost a religion with me. I do believe in a Supreme Being, but I'd rather go fly-fishing than go to Mass. Hell, if I go out onto a stream and I don't catch any fish, I still feel that way. I see a couple of nice birds or a fish jump or a deer or a moose or whatever the hell, or another fly-fisherman. I love to watch people fish; I love to watch fly-fishermen. Especially my son, he's a hell of a caster."
He scribbles a second phone number and slides the piece of paper across the glass. "You go see Conway. He'll tell you something about fishing."
Eileen wryly interjects, "That Conway, he's been coming in here since he was little. We always took him fishing. He filled up the bay and the lakes with rocks. He was a little brat." She smiles, drops some flies in a little plastic container. "He loved to eat squid. I used to flinch when I watched him eat 'em. He'd eat tentacles, head, eyes, and everything." She shudders.
John laughs, a short bark from the corner of his mouth, as I head out. "See ya," he says, from behind the counter.
The door opens, the bell rings.
Copyright © 2000 by Richard Louv