News from Blue Ribbon Flies

2012 Catalog Entries.
Teach a Man to Fish

Photo by Kate Sherwood

"Teach a Man to Fish" by Michael T. Harves

I thought sure I was going to hook up at any minute and with pounding heart and shaking hands I fired cast after cast. Still no success; it was so dark I couldn't even see the river let alone my fly. I thought I felt something at one point but there was no resistance at the end of my line. Thoroughly frustrated, I brought by fly to hand to blow it dry and realized in my flogging that I had broken the hook point. Those 27 year-old eyes couldn't help in total darkness and, with none of the fancy lighting devices available today, I called it quits with vows to fix my mistakes the next evening. Upon returning to camp, I found that my companions had similar stories to tell. We would get them tomorrow! Tomorrow turned out to be the first of those two bright and sunny days and I could not resist the opportunity to fish the river in the daytime, despite the words of advice from the publican. I had come to New Zealand to fish and that's what I was going to do. It is at this point in my story that I must come clean. I actually had no right to be where I was doing what I was. I was a fraud! Oh sure, I had been fly-fishing since I was 14 but I was a "correspondence school" fly fisherman. All I knew I gleaned from the pages of "Field and Stream"(the BRF catalog was years in the future) and the odd Curt Gowdy TV appearance. A.J. McClane, Ted Trueblood, and others filled my mind with casting skills, fly types, water-reading, insect hatches, and knot tying. I taught myself to cast, had no mentors to guide me, and dreamed of fishing all the "great places" one day. I fished successfully on small streams in the mountains of California, Nevada, and Utah as a teen but put trout fishing away during my college years in Indiana. I got degrees in biology and zoology and did my graduate work in freshwater ecology. I learned lots about aquatic insects and fish behavior and was set to continue that education at the Ph.D. level back out West but fates intervened and I went to Australia to teach.

And that's how New Zealand came to pass; I was in one of those "great places" but before my time. I did not know it then but do now, that one must "earn" trips like this one if you really want to make the most of them. There are prereqs in the study of fly-fishing and I had skipped a bunch and was about to get reminded of that neglect. But being an arrogant 20 something, I was not even remotely thinking such thoughts. I was in trout heaven before most of the rest of the world knew much about it. I was not going to run up against the "you should have been here yesterday" mantra; I was there before yesterday! I set out from camp and went down river to find some feeding fish. It did not take long. In the gin-clear water (it really is in New Zealand) a large brown was suspended at the head of a pool where two currents converged and slowly rose from time to time to take something gently from the surface. Or so I thought; I missed that lecture on emergers but was about to get tested on it. From the bank and slightly upstream of the fish, I made my first cast of a small dry fly of local design. The first false cast was all it took. In one big swirl, the brown disappeared under bank created by the massive tree roots of the tree I thought I was hiding behind. I decided to wait the fish out (To this day, I don't know why but I did, repeatedly!). I spent several hours trying to get a fly on the water with out spooking the fish and gradually I did. However, even as the brown continued to feed, my offerings went untouched. Yes, I tried almost everything in my fly box, including terrestrial patterns, but never even turned a head. Bad casts resulted in the waiting game; decent ones just floated on by. I went back to camp with my tail between my legs but my resolve intact. I was too worn out to retry the night thing.

The next day, number two of the bright and sunny kind, brought with it a new strategy. I was determined to see if I could figure out what the fish was feeding on. I returned to the pool and was rewarded with the brown still holding in its preferred lie, feeding regularly. I hid behind the tree and watched carefully. I saw nothing on the surface of the river, yet the fish was just barely sticking its snout out of the water and sipping in something small. I racked my brain to recall anything I might have read about such situations. An article on nymphs by Ernie Schwiebert came to mind out of the fog. I had not actually read any of his books or any of the other greats of fly-fishing literature; remember, I'm still a fraud at this point. So with some vague idea in mind, I found a small Hare's Ear and greased it up; it was pure inspiration and I knew I had solved the problem. Yes, pride does go before a fall, and the first cast resulted in the typical brown-under-the-bank-boogie. More time went by as I tried to make the right cast, convinced that I had the right fly. I stopped to watch some more but expanded my vision a bit to see the bigger picture. That's when I looked at the tail of the pool and realized I could cross and have a nice little sand bar on which to approach the brown from below. Hello, it took two days to figure that out? I should not have slept through that presentation on presentation.