Seeing Them
An essay on one of the most important parts of fly fishing
Often it’s just their signs—a ring appearing where once all was flat, a splashy grab for an escaping imago, the boil of a bad-ass bass taking down a dragonfly from a lily-pad. On the ocean, it can be their smell, fishy-oily-almondy-sweet, getting stronger as they invisibly approach, the finger-length menhaden getting nervous, turning, diving, their sides flashing bright silver when the light catches them. Other times it’s finding a way to adjust my eyes, looking and not looking all at once until—a wavering tail, the spotted sides, the white mouth opening like a white deer flag rising amidst all the brown of the leaf-bare forest exactly the same color as its fur. A big brown holding perfectly still until angling up or down or sideways ever so slightly as the food conveyors by, and he shifts position to intercept it. And when seen through the refracting lens of water, even the big ones seem a little smaller, most of them remaining invisible to my air-born eyes. Seeing them is such an important part of it all for me, just seeing them. The expanse of a stream roaring by (a steady rush of sound and cool moist air), the glass flat of a back creek flat only inches deep extending out endlessly in front of me as I wade along, the weedline of a small, Adirondack lake reflecting an empty, cloudless July sky, the dip, dip of my kayak paddle the only sound…all become something more alive, more complete as I try to read the right signs, see down into their more-alive depths.
The Bahamas
A kayak tied off to a belt loop of my wading pants, wading cautiously through not-calf-deep water toward the glinting bonefish tails like so many signaling castaways. Tails shifting, pivoting, catching the sun then becoming invisible again when they turn away, until, crouching, nearly on knees now, I get close enough to see them turning near me, their whole sides now, exactly the color of the sandy bottom, so at first I am really seeing just the shadow of them moving, noses down, pushing up the clean white sand into cloudy puffs in the otherwise crystalline water, rooting for shrimp, crabs, giving themselves away. More often than not I only see them once I have startled them, big-shouldered, dashing out from the shade of a mangrove edge after I stumble a little, move just a tad too fast, brush away a passing insect, and suddenly they are there, abracadabra, strong and lovely and terrified, and the only good news is I now attempt to watch them as long as I can as they steadily fin far, far away across the flat, training my eyes to find what moments before I could not see though it was right in front of me. Recently, on the back creeks of Cat Island, fishing without a bonefish guide for the first time, it took me two full days of spooking fish before I finally hooked up, saw the shadow first, then triangulated the angle of the late afternoon sun, then saw the bonefish move up from a deeper cut, finally, toward where my fly sparkled and moved across the flat in short, quick bursts.
Michigan
April, cold-as-winter still, patches of grainy snow holding on in the shady places on the north sides of trees, rocks. The water freshet high and off color, always seeming tan-brown until the light and my vision coincide in the right way, and I see through. That silver-grey blur, a rock a moment ago, turns sideways, shakes her white belly, sending eggs into the gravel bed, giving her away, and behind her, where I want to see them, the male steelhead, three of them, 12 maybe 15 pounders, come into focus, mirroring her like bodyguards, secret service, teenagers trailing a few guarded steps behind a pretty girl. I flip the “slinky” rig upstream—this is barely fly fishing—the parachute cord tube filled with beads of lead shot, the ends melted shut to keep it all contained, one large weight that will not snag, a large nymph attached to that, then tied off the hook bend of the nymph, the fly that usually works, a small puff of yarn the color of the eggs. They are feeding regularly, their large white mouths opening and closing as they partake in this tumult of sex and dining. The sex, however, is the far more important venture here, so my cast has to be perfect. The fly has to drift very nearly right into their mouths, and if they strike, it will be in response to the whole onslaught of emotions that swim through them as they swim up onto the beds to release their silt onto the neat piles of eggs. I have to watch carefully. I won’t feel the strike, so often a wild shaking of a head means they have eaten, then rejected your offering. After a number of missed opportunities, I will see them swim calmly out of the way of my drifting flies, no matter how perfect the cast, and it is time to move on, to find another drama upon which to intrude.
Mexico
In the hundreds of miles of mangroves that stretch north of Campeche, pushing in through mangroves in kayaks till I see the obvious turbulence of cresting baby tarpon, hidden away in these far-in “ponds” at the heart of the mangroves, so when I cast and see them erupt toward the fast-as-you-can-strip-it motion of my fly, I know my odds of wrestling them away from the mangrove roots are not good. A broken 9-weight rod later and only a few of the smaller ones to show for it, and I realize seeing them there, finding them in these deep, secret places is what will remain of this memory for years to come. Like seeing them dockside in Progreso, after bait fishing with a good friend, far out in the undulating Gulf, the Yucatan north shore a nearly invisible mirage on the southern horizon. The big tarpon come swooping up from beneath the docks to eat the offal the boat boy tosses in the water as he cleans the remainder of the grouper, snapper we have caught. So I pull out a fly rod and tie on a bright red tarpon fly and cast to where I see them, big swirls beneath a handful of tossed-overboard fish guts. I see the tarpon take my offering hard, see it rush about between the many pylons of the harbor before being wrapped around one, broken off, gone, and soon a crowd is watching this strange thing, this gringo trying to catch the fish that are not good eating on his strange rod with its puff of red feathers at the end. They start to cheer. They have not seen anything like this, but never get to see me land one, and perhaps I shouldn’t have even tried. Half a dozen flies and leader rigs later I realize it might have been well enough just to see them, to know they were there. And days later, off Isla Holbox, I am far out in the Gulf with a single guide in a small panga, chasing schools of giant tarpon, seeing them in the distance, porpoising, the guide hitting the gas hard, his old outboard complaining, cutting the motor, watching them, knowing he would intercept their path, telling me to get ready, to strip off line and make sure it won’t tangle at my feet, to start casting, and then I see them beneath me, 10-20 feet down, as long as I am tall, swooping through the green-blue water where the Caribbean and Gulf mix, and he tells me to cast, to count to 20, to let the sinking line sink then strip, fast, hand over hand till I feel the jolt that nearly pulls me in….
Montana
Every bridge over every creek becomes a lookout as I drive through the vastness of this state, living out of the back of my pickup, my wife pregnant back home in Michigan with my first son, this solo trip so important before so many unknown, unseen things begin in my life. Soon I learn about the big gulps of browns and rainbows at the heads of pools, the more frantic slashing of the brook trout behind them, and behind these, far down in the hierarchy, the sips of the humble whitefish gladly taking what all the others have left behind. I learn to see the barely there then gone gulps of the rainbows, the dignified inhalations of big browns in the slower bank-edge eddies. Later I learn to look in the spider webs of bank-side grasses, to see what insects are trapped there, mayflies, stoneflies, caddis…. I learn to look, too, on the exposed rocks in the stream, to find the casings of the insects that have hatched. Soon I start to see the difference in their rise forms, telling you at what stage of the insect’s metamorphosis they are targeting. In the evening before setting up camp, crawling in, finally, exhausted under the cap of my pickup truck, I might hear the calm sips of trout effortlessly taking the spent mayfly spinners from the surface (they have now completed their just 24 hours of living and mating and sacrifice themselves), and soon I am seeing my cast unfurl above the surface, following the descending line with my arm so it makes barely a splash.
Long Island Sound
Here binoculars are an important tool, and with them, the subtleties of other modes of fishing vanish, especially when the bluefish have come in from whatever mysterious depths they disappear to, far far from our sight every fall. This is a simpler game. Find the birds. Find the birds and big splashes beneath them. Certainly look for the big swirling tornadoes of birds often seen with your bare eyes even from far away, but also look for a single bird, terns are the best (they are more trustworthy, and not easily swayed by the kinds of things the gulls will foolishly rush toward), and if they are flying with some urgency, see if you can follow them long enough with your eyes to tell which direction they are headed, then turn your binoculars there, and, more often than not, the whole picture will come into view. They will come from all corners of the harbor, from far out across the sound, from seaside marshes, if the bluefish are blitzing, pushing up waves of silver menhaden, leaving guts and fish pieces drifting about long after they are through with their frenetic assaults.
Seeing them. Finding a new way to look. Shadows, light, looking past, beyond, through, seeing toward something else. The magic eyes of Bonefish Cordell in Bimini telling me five minutes before I could spot them where they would show, fluent in the language of ripple and shadow and glint and motion. Learning to look harder, look right, this the first kind of catching, an extension of this elemental, essential thing we love to do. Holding them aloft once they are caught, seeing them there, pressed against the cold, yellow plastic of my kayak, curving against the sides of a trout net, lipped and lifted into air...is seeing them differently, out of their element and surely not seeing them as fully as I do with that first glimpse, so often just a hint of something in the corner of my eye.
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You’re on fire, amigo. Scintillating writing going on here 👏
I’ve shared it with two fine friends and writers, Courtney Reid and Tico Vogt, who live outside Saratoga Springs and are among our Saratoga contingent of creative folks we met and befriended way back in the mid 1970’s. I suspect they’re going to like what you’re putting out:)