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Angling cliches . . .

By Steven J. Meyers

Found in: | Outside | Fishing | Fly Fishing |

You may have noticed: I don't write very many technical fly-fishing columns, and when I do, I usually begin by apologizing.

Years ago, an editor at a well-known outdoor publisher asked me why I hadn't written a technical fly-fishing book. "You're a fishing guide, for crying out loud! You're a writer. You have a publisher. You have an audience. I don't know why you haven't written a dozen of them!" The editor was with an outfit that was not my publisher, and I half suspected she was angling to get me to write a technical fishing book for her. I didn't bite.

Long-time anglers, in my experience, buy few of those books-they bought every one they could get their hands on when they were starting out, but after a couple of years on the stream they, like wise old trout, became selective. And, if they once subscribed to one or more of the several fly-fishing magazines out there, they'd long-since stopped buying and reading them as well. In my experience, a truly worthwhile technical book comes along once or twice a decade (and I definitely buy and read those!)-books like Vince Marinaro's, A Modern Dry Fly Code, Ernie Schwiebert's, Matching the Hatch, Swisher and Richards, Selective Trout, and (a personal favorite because it is both technically brilliant and expressively written) Datus Proper's, What the Trout Said. But the vast majority of technical books, the vast majority of technical fly-fishing articles in magazines, repeat a well-worn handful of subjects over and over. Typically, if you've done any reading at all in the field you discover a few sentences into almost anything about angling that you've already read the piece a dozen times before. Worse, some of what you read, some of what is repeated as fact, is flat wrong. I guess fishing is no different from other things we do. If something is said often enough, it's accepted as truth-and passed on.

Here are few often-repeated angling clich�s that are just plain wrong:

If you want to catch a big fish, you need to fish a big fly. If you want to catch a big fish, you need to fish a fly he'll eat. If there are ten-thousand #22 mayflies on the water and the trout you want is sipping them in the film, he might eat your #6 Sofa Pillow, but he is more likely to swim away from it.

It's best to fish early in the morning or late in the evening. It's best to fish when the fish are active. If the reason the fish are active relates primarily to water temperature, yes, that might mean early or late in places where the water is too warm mid-day (can you say Animas River in the summer?). But it might just as well mean fishing mid-day where the water is too cold early or late (a high-country creek in the late fall). If the primary trigger for feeding is an insect hatch, the best time to fish is usually just before and during the hatch, no matter what time of day that is.

Dry flies and nymphs have to be fished dead drift. Nope. Flies have to fished in a way that triggers a take; that usually (not always) means making the fly behave like a natural insect. Try fishing an emerging caddis below a dry one, dead drift; then, swing it. After you stop smiling, call me and tell me how it went.

Nymphs have replaced wet flies, and wet flies are obsolete. Tell that to a soft-hackle fly addict.

And maybe my favorite, Dry flies are more difficult to fish than other flies; therefore, the person who fishes them is morally superior to the one who fishes nymphs and wet flies. Actually, in many circumstances, dry flies are far easier to fish than nymphs and wet flies. Like most aspersions cast from positions of moral superiority . . . well, I won't dignify this one with a lengthy response.

I'm sure you have your own list.

So, what angling books do I like to read?

Books that capture the depth and complexity of the experience itself. Books that put me there. Writing that makes me think, and feel. Literature that help me remember that doing anything well is difficult, that doing this thing well connects me with a world so much larger than my limited human experience would reveal to me if I were to spend too much of it sitting in my study writing the thousandth unnecessary article about tailing loops, micro-drag, or how to tie the latest version of the muddler minnow.