A Good Book

My good friend and neighbor, Bruce Weir, recently loaned me a good book. It’s called The Longest Silence – A Life in Fishing, by Thomas McGuane, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc, 1999, New York. Mr. McGuane has written several books, but this one has thirty-three essays about another sustaining passion of his, fishing. Of his youth in Michigan, he writes:

“Everyone in our family had a huge brown fly rod with a Portuguese cork handle and identical Pflueger Medalist reels of the size used for Atlantic salmon. As I look back, I am touched by my father’s attempts to bring us to sport, en famille.

I remember when he and my mother canoed the Pere Marquette in that early phase. Passing underneath the branches of streamside trees, my mother seized one of them in terror. The branch flexed; the canoe turned sideways in the current and began to go under. My father bellowed to let go of the branch. My mother did and the branch shot across the canoe like a longbow, taking my father across the chest and knocking him overboard.

With his weight gone, one end of the canoe rose four feet out of the water and my mother twirled downstream until my father contrived to race along a footpath and make the rescue.

When it was done, two rods with Portuguese cork grips were gone. The canoe was saved until my brother and I used it as a toboggan in snow-filled streambeds and beat the bottom out of it.”

In another chapter called Back in Ireland, the author writes:

“One night I read a copy of the Dublin Times about a month old. The Beatles had seized the English-speaking world and would soon have the rest. There was an upstart band from London, the Rolling Stones, who would soon play Dublin. A large advertisement suggested this band was going places. I looked at their pictures in astonishment. Only the English cities, I thought, could come up with these drooling imbeciles whose stippled and wolfish jaws and pusspocket eyes indicated a genetic  impasse.  A decade later, I tried and failed to get tickets to their concert at Altamont, where with their retinue of Hell’s Angels, a rock ‘n’ roll ceremony of murder was performed for our guitar-ridden new world. I didn’t even see it coming.”

And the author gives us some pearls of wisdom in fishing techniques, including:

After much futile casting to trout rises in a beaver pond stillwater, the author speculates that the trout were cruising in search of another morsel. Leaving his fly floating in one spot until a moving trout spotted it brought success, although it sometimes took up to 15 minutes. “One might say, pragmatically, that in still or nearly still waters, feeding trout cruise; and that in streams and rivers they tend to take a feeding lane and watch a panel of moving water overhead, elevating to eat when something passes; …” Anglers fishing our sea-trout gullies might benefit from this technique, if they have enough patience. I know some who have and some who have not.

Here’s a tested and proven salmon fly version of the Evening Storm, Roland Pentz’s popular and highly successful new wet trout fly. For fall fishing, a hen hackle throat is replaced by longer, fuller, and softer turkey marabou.

Evening Storm (fall salmon fly version)

Thread:                      UTC G.S.P. 75 Denier thread

Hook:                          Daiichi  2161, size 1 - 6

Tag:                            Oval gold tinsel, size fine

Tail:                             Golden pheasant crests (2)

Rib:                             Flat gold tinsel

Body:                          Black Ultra-Chenille, micro size

Hackle:                       Purple hen hackle or, for fall, long purple marabou

Wing:                          Grey squirrel tail dyed purple over 6 strands blue Krystal Flash

Head:                         Black thread finished with 2 coats clear glossy head cement.           

Please send comments and suggestions to slim@rivermagic.ca.

Please stay on the line …